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AIRY NOTHINGS 

OR WHAT YOU WILL 



BY 



GEORGE GORDON k.<uu^ 



"Kew 13orft 

STURGIS & WALTON 

COMPANY 

1917 

All rights reserved 



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Copyright, 19 17, 
By STURGIS & WALTON COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published, October, 1917. 



This play in printed form is designed for the 
reading public only. All dramatic rights in it 
are fully protected by copyright in the United 
States and Great Britain, and no performance 
— professional or amateur — or public reading, 
may be given without the written permission of 
the publishers and the payment of royalty. Ad- 
dress all communications with reference thereto, 
to Sturgis & Walton Company, 31-33 East 27th 
Street, New York. 



JAN 15 1918 

©CI.A4814U3 



-^ 



TO 

MISS KATHERINE MACDONALD 

In memory of many pleasant evenings spent 

at the theatre, and in especial of the 

night we witnessed Mr. Granville 

Barker's production of "A 

Midsummer Night's 

Dream" 



An antique fable, and thereto a preface on 
morals, such as Theseus, reputed sometime 
Duke of Athens, vowed he never could believe. 
And with good reason: poets, lovers and mad- 
men have such seething brains, bodying forth 
the form of things unknown, giving to airy noth- 
ing a local habitation and a name. And yet, 
what^s in a name? The first recorded William 
Shakespeare was hanged for robbery in 1248; 
the latest Cleopatra dances in burlesque. Mary 
Fitton or Mistress Davenant — what odds the 
name? A poet loved a woman and wooed her 
frailty into immortal rhyme. You are content 
to read his verses; then why not I? Why 
must I see all Helenas beauty in a brow of 
Egypt? Because I know there is a world of 
romance in a name; and when you whisper 
** Guenevere ** to me, my soul harks back to 
Arthur's court, mine eyes look on the queen, and 
in a dream I seem to see her walking 'mid the 
flowers of Camelot; I see her pause and raise 
her head as on the gravel-walk she hears the 
tread of Lancelots mailed feet. And Mary? 
*Tis the name of the Mother of God. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

William Shakespeare: a quotation ... 3 

Pons Asinorum : a preface of parts .... 7 

Mary! Mary! a play In one act . . . . 9^ 

L'Envoi 143 



AIRY NOTHINGS, 

OR WHAT YOU WILL 



/ 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

OR WHAT YOU WILL 

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

Even a long human life Is so brief and 
fugitive that it seems little short of a miracle 
that it can leave traces behind which endure 
through centuries. The millions die and sink 
into oblivion and their deeds die with them. A 
few thousands so far conquer death as to leave 
their names to be a burden to the memories of 
school children, but convey little else to pos- 
terity. But some few master-minds remain, 
and among them Shakespeare ranks with Leon- 
ardo and Michael Angelo. He was hardly 
laid in his grave than he rose from it again. 
Of all the great names of this earth, none is 
more certain of immortality than that of Shake- 
speare. . . . And he is not thirty-six plays and 
a few poems jumbled together and read pele- 
mele, but a man who felt and thought, rejoiced 
and suffered, brooded, dreamed, and created. 
Far too long has it been the custom to say, * We 

3 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

know nothing about Shakespeare ' ; or, * An 
octavo page would contain all our knowledge 
of him.' Even Swinburne has written of the 
intangibility of his personality in his works. 
Such assertions have been carried so far that a 
wretched group of dilettanti has been bold 
enough, in Europe and America, to deny Wil- 
liam Shakespeare the right to his own life-work, 
to give to another the honor due to his genius, 
and to bespatter him and his invulnerable name 
with an insane abuse which has re-echoed 
through every land. . . . 

It is the author's opinion that, given the pos- 
session of forty-five important works by any 
man, it is entirely our fault if we know nothing 
whatever about him. The poet has Incorpo- 
rated his whole individuality In these writings, 
and there, If we can read aright, we shall find 
him. 

The William Shakespeare who was born in 
Stratford-on-Avon In the reign of Queen Eliza- 
beth, who lived and wrote In London In her 
reign and that of James, who ascended Into 
heaven In his comedies and descended into hell 
In his tragedies, and died at the age of fifty-two 
in his native town, rises a wonderful personality 
in grand and distinct outlines, with all the vivid 
colouring of life, from the pages of his books 
before the eyes of all who read them with an 

4 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

open, receptive mind, with sanity of judgment 
and simple susceptibility to the power of 
genius. 

— Georg Brandes: William Shake- 
speare, A Critical Study. 



PONS ASINORUM 

*' Pope was not a poet In the true sense/' — 
I quote from Mr. Arthur Symons' The Ro- 
mantic Movement in English Literature — 
*' a born poet who had the misfortune to be 
modified by the influence of the age into which 
he was born, but a writer of extraordinary prose 
capacity and finish, who, if he had lived in an- 
other age and among genuine poets, would have 
had no more than a place apart, admired for 
the unique thing which he could do, but not 
mistaken for a poet of true lineage. Pope's 
poetic sensibility may be gauged by a single 
emendation which he made in the text of his 
edition of Shakespeare. Shakespeare had 
made Antony say to Cleopatra, ' O grave 
charm.' To Pope It seemed ridiculous that a 
light woman should possess gravity In charm. 
He proposed ' gay,' and nature seemed to be 
reasserted : ' O gay charm ! ' what more prob- 
able and sufficient?" 



Nor was Pope alone In believing himself 
capable of Improving upon Shakespeare's text. 

7 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

Take the fantastic Interlude of the drunken 
porter in Macbeth, Act II, 3. It follows im- 
mediately upon the masterly scene between 
Macbeth and his wife wherein he tells her that 
he has murdered Duncan, and she upbraids him 
for not having smeared the grooms with blood 
that it might seem their guilt. They leave the 
stage. There is a knocking within, and the 
porter enters, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. 
He has been carousing with the king's men, 
and, the worse for wine, believes himself to be 
keeping watch at hell-gate, admitting first a 
farmer that had hanged himself, then an equivo- 
cating Jesuit, and finally an English tailor. 
* But this place is too cold to be hell; ' and so 
saying, he comes broad awake. Xhe knocking 
continues. He opens the gate; and Macduff 
enters, accompanied by Lennox. There fol- 
lows a dialogue between Macduff and the porter 
on the Influence of drink upon erotic Inclination 
and capacity. Now the Elizabethan was a cur- 
talnless stage. A short break in the action of 
the tragedy was required at this point to give 
Macbeth time to change into his night-clothes, 
wash the blood from his hands, and reappear 
with the air of one called up from bed. What 
could have been more effective than this scene 
which thrills Macbeth and his wife with terror? 
Who could be abroad at this hour in the morn- 

8 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

ing? Have they been discovered? While it 
may not rank with the best of Shakespeare's low 
comedy interludes, it affords a striking contrast 
to what goes before and to what follows; it is 
a lull in the storm that is sweeping Macbeth on 
to his doom; it affords the spectators some re- 
lief. And yet, as is well known, Schiller, in 
accordance with classical prejudices, omitted the 
sohloquy from his translation, replacing it by 
a pious morning song. But what seems even 
more remarkable, Coleridge, a presumably 
competent critic, considered the passage spuri- 
ous — save for one phrase too Shakespearean 
to reject, ' the primrose way to the everlasting 
bonfire ' — and its effect disturbing. 

There is a world of difference between the 
tone of such corrections and the changes made 
by Shakespeare in the old plays which he re- 
touched for my Lord Chamberlain's company 
of players. What an improvement he makes, 
sometimes by a mere rearrangement of the 
words, as when Gloucester says of his wife, 
Henry VI, Part II, Act II, 4: — 

Uneath may she endure the flinty streets 
To tread them with her tender-feeling feet. 

His sympathy for her echoes between the lines ; 
yet in the original text it was she who spoke 
those words. Most Shakespearean too is the 

9 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

manner in which York's two sons are made to 
draw their own characters, each in a single line, 
when they receive news of their father's death, 
Henry VI, Part III, Act II, i : — 

Edward: O, speak no more! for I have heard too 

much. 
Richard: Say how he died, for I will hear it all. 

There is a line in King Lear, Act IV, 7, 
that has a history, and shows how well Shake- 
speare understood what to preserve and use, 
what to discard, in the work of his predecessors. 
The old king is borne sleeping onto the stage. 
The doctor orders music to sound, and Cor- 
delia says : — 

O my dear father! Restoration hang 
Thy medicine on my lips; and let this kiss 
Repair those violent harms that my two sisters 
Have in thy reverence made! 

Kent: Kind and dear princess! 

Cor.: Had you not been their father, these white 
flakes 
Had challenged pity of them. Was this a face 
. To be opposed against the warring winds ? 
To stand against the deep dread-bolted thunder? 

Lear stirs and wakes; Cordelia asks: — 

How does my royal lord? How fares your maj- 
esty? 

10 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

Lear : You do me wrong to take me out o' the grave : 
Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound 
Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears 
Do scald like molten lead. 

.Then he comes to himself, asks where he has 
been, and where he Is; is surprised to find the 
day so fair ; remembers what he has suffered : — 

Cor. : O, look upon me, sir, 
And hold your hands In benediction o'er me: 
No, sir, you must not kneel. 

Notice this last line. In the old drama, 
dating from 1593-4, and entitled The Chron- 
icle History of King Leir, this kneeling was 
a prominent feature. There the king and 
Perlllus, (Kent), wandering about, almost per- 
ished, without food, without shelter, fall In with 
Cordelia and her husband, the King of Gaul; 
the daughter recognises her father, and gives 
him to eat and drink. When he is satisfied, 
he recounts to her the trials and adventures 
through which he and his faithful friend have 
passed. Then: — 

Leir: O no men's children are unkind but mine. 
Cordelia: Condemne not all, because of others' 
crime, 
But looke, deare father, look, behold and see 
Thy loving daughter speaketh unto thee. 

{She kneeles). 
II 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

Leir: O, stand thou up, it is my part to kneele, 
And ask forgiveness for my former faults 

{He kneeles). 

The scene is doubtless beautiful, but would 
be impossible upon the stage where two per- 
sons kneeling to each other (as actually occurs 
in some of Moliere's comedies) cannot but 
produce a comic effect. Shakespeare under- 
stood this; he was intimately acquainted with 
his audience, profoundly and practically versed 
in stagecraft; he knew how to utilise to the best 
advantage the good in another man's work. 
And yet, as Lowell has said, " scarce a com- 
mentator of them all, for more than a hundred 
years, but thought, as Alphonso of Castile did 
of Creation, that, if he had only been at Shake- 
speare's elbow, he could have given valuable 
advice; scarce one who did not know off-hand 
that there was never a seaport in Bohemia — 
as if Shakespeare's world were one which Mer- 
cator could have projected; scarce one but was 
satisfied that his ten finger-tips were a sufficient 
key to those astronomic wonders of poise and 
counterpoise, of planetary law and cometary 
seeming-exception, in his metres ; scarce one but 
thought he could gauge like an ale-firkin that 
intuition whose edging shallows may have been 
sounded, but whose abysses, stretching down 
amid the sunless roots of Being and Conscious- 

12 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

ness, mock the plummet; scarce one but could 
speak with condescending approval of that 
prodigious intelligence so utterly without con- 
gener that our baffled language must coin an 
adjective to qualify it, and none is so audacious 
as to say Shakespearean of any other.'* 

James Russell Lowell, however, underesti- 
mated our audacity. Only yesterday Profes- 
sor Henderson spoke of Strindberg as a dram- 
atist truly Shakespearean in range, power and 
intensity of feeling. Myself I consider Synge 
to have been almost Shakespearean in his ca- 
pacity for sympathy and in the haunting beauty 
of his prose. There are two lines in Poe's An- 
nabel Lee : — 

With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven 
Coveted her and me 

Compare with this a somewhat similar passage 
in The Playboy of the Western World: — 

Pegeen: [looking at him playfully]. And it's that 
kind of a poacher's love you'd make, Christy Mahon, 
on the sides of Neifin, when the night is down? 

Christy: It's little you'll think if my love is a 
poacher's, or an earl's itself, when you'll feel my 
two hands stretched around you, and I squeezing 
kisses on your puckered lips, till I'd feel a kind of 
pity for the Lord God is all ages sitting lonesome 
in his golden chair. 

13 



AIRY NOTHINGS 



II 



Professor George Lyman KIttredge, in a lec- 
ture on Shakespeare delivered at Harvard Uni- 
versity, April 23, 19 1 6, refers to Dr. Johnson 
as *' one of the most sensible and serviceable 
in that long array of professed Shakespeare- 
ans '* — and we are all of us, more or less, pro- 
fessed Shakespeareans — " that bids fair to 
stretch out to the crack of doom; " quotes the 
learned doctor to the effect that " men, in gen- 
eral, do not need so much to be informed as 
to be reminded;'* and thanks his honoured 
ghost for that reminder. And I thank the pro- 
fessor. There Is nothing new beneath the sun; 
all that I shall say, men have heard before; 
all that you will find here written In my book, 
I have come by honestly — I have stolen from 
the books of others, as the professor stole from 
Boswell. For who is Dr. Johnson? For us 
a creation of Boswell's. And so It Is to Boswell 
that I would direct your attention. He is by no 
means the least of the professed Shakespear- 
eans; he Is too often slighted by those who feign 
to love fine writing, too often ignored by a 
world that quotes him every day. Nor do I 
consider It blasphemy to mention him In the 
same breath with Shakespeare. There is a 

14 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

strange analogy between the two: each is su- 
preme In his own chosen field. Shakespeare 
dramatised the lives of many men and women — 
Richard the Third, Viola, Lear, Hamlet, Mac- 
beth and Portia, Mercutio, and a vast company 
of their peers; for us they exist only as he has 
told about them. And so with Dr. Johnson. 
Not in the absurdly dignified and laboured sen- 
tences that flowed in awesome periods from his 
pen, but in the shrewd and brilliant talk that fell 
like manna from his lips to be gathered by his 
friend and so fed to the multitude, is contained 
the whole man and his romance, his amour 
with life, his coquetting with death. Shake- 
speare writing to William Herbert — for my 
part, I am convinced that he was the Mr. W. H. 
of the Dedication — said. Sonnet XVII : — 

Who will believe my verse In time to come, 

If it were fill'd with your most high deserts? 

But were some child of yours alive that time, 
You should live twice — in it and in my rhyme. 

And again, Sonnet XIX : — 

Yet, do thy worst, old Time ; despite thy wrong. 
My love shall in my verse ever live young. 

As Mr. Shaw remarks, 'Shakespeare immor- 
talised Mr. W. H., as he said he would, simply 

15 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

by writing about him.' Boswell seems to have 
had some such idea in mind regarding Johnson. 
And he was, as Henley has pointed out, fully 
alive to the enduring merits of his achievement: 
" I will venture to say," he wrote, " that he 
(Johnson) will be seen in this work more com- 
pletely than any man that has ever Hved." 

Nor is this all. They have been blamed and 
praised de profundis in excelsis. Shakespeare 
is patronised by Broadway; Macaulay explicitly 
declares that Boswell wrote one of the most 
charming of books because he was one of the 
greatest of fools. They have been idolised 
perhaps; but they have suffered above the 
average at the hands of posterity, from the ig- 
norance of their editors and the stupidity of 
readers the world over. A plague on all 
cowards I 

III 

* Delassons-nous un peu a parler de M. de 
Pontmartin,' says Sainte-Beuve, at the outset 
of a causerie. Not that there is any connection 
(to paraphrase Mr. Austin Dobson) between 
M. de Pontmartin and Boswell of whom I shall 
speak; nor — let me hasten to add — between 
myself and ' the keenest and finest of French 
literary critics.' But that Boswell has been for 

i6 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

years the cheerful companion of many an hour's 
relaxation; and I, for one, never tire of refer- 
ring to him. Mr. Augustine Birrell, the most 
charming of Johnsonians — I am everlastingly 
indebted to him for that essay on Falstaff — in- 
sists that when he is finally ' kicked out of of- 
fice/ he will retire into the country and really 
read Boswell. An enviable ambition! What 
is most distinctive in Boswell is Boswell's 
method and Boswell's manner; yet from the 
very outset, it would seem, he was considerably 
* edited.' We must forget his editors if we 
would ' really read Boswell.' Long ago John- 
son, referring to the Corsican tour, had touched 
upon the personal quality in his writings. 
" Your History," he said, *' is like other his- 
tories, but your Journal is in a very high degree 
curious and delightful . . . Your History was 
copied from books; your Journal rose out of 
your own experience and observation. You ex- 
press images which operated strongly upon 
yourself, and you have impressed them with 
great force upon your readers." From less 
friendly critics the verdict was the same. Mr. 
Austin Dobson has a very interesting note 
on the subject. His essay, Boswell's Prede- 
cessors and Editors is well worth reading. 
" Gray, who has been * pleased and moved 
strangely,' declares it proves what he has al- 

17 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

ways maintained, * that any fool may write a 
most valuable book by chance, if he will only 
tell us what he heard and saw with veracity.' 
This faculty of communicating his impressions 
accurately to his reader is Boswell's most con- 
spicuous gift. Present in his first book, it was 
more present in his second, and when he began 
his great biography it had reached its highest 
point. So individual is his manner, so unique 
his method of collecting and arranging his in- 
formation, that to disturb the native character 
of his narrative by interpolating foreign ma- 
terial, must of necessity impair its specific char- 
acter and imperil its personal note. Yet, by 
some strange freak of fate, this was just the 
very treatment to which it was subjected." It 
seems that " Boswell, like many writers of his 
temperament, was fond of stimulating his flag- 
ging invention by miscellaneous advice, and it 
is plain from the comparison of his finished 
work with his rough notes, that in order to 
make his anecdotes more direct and effective he 
freely manipulated his reminiscences "; much as 
Shakespeare manipulated Plutarch, Holinsjhed 
and the old plays he rewrote. " But it is quite 
probable — and this is a point that we do not 
remember to have seen touched on — that much 
of the trimming which his records received is 
attributable to M alone. At all events, when 

i8 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

Malone took up the editing after Boswell's 
death, he is known to have made many minor 
alterations in the process of * settling the text,* 
and it is only reasonable to suppose that he had 
done the same thing in the author's lifetime, a 
supposition which would account for some at 
least of the variations which have been ob- 
served between Boswell's anecdotes in their 
earliest and their latest forms. But the ad- 
mitted alterations of Malone were but trifles 
compared with the extraordinary readjustment 
which the book, as Malone left it, received at 
the hands of Mr. Croker." Nor was Croker 
the only offender; their name is legion — Ma- 
caulay, Carlyle, Lockhart, (writing to Mur- 
ray, the publisher, Jan. 19, 1829, he said, * Pray 
ask Croker whether Boswell's account of the 
Hebridean Tour ought not to be melted into 
the book,' very much as Sir Herbert Tree 
* melted ' Falstaff via the clothes-basket out of 
Henry IV into the Merry Wives of Windsor), 
Carruthers, Fitzgerald and who not. His days 
of sorrowing are probably not yet ended, de- 
spite Henley's spirited appeal that he be given 
without further parley that high place among 
the great artists of all time that is his by every 
claim of genius. The Baconians assail the Im- 
perturbable figure of Shakespeare much as Eng- 
land once jeered at Napoleon and the French 

19 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

or we at England; why should Boswell be per- 
mitted to go scot-free? The heroes of an- 
tiquity, erect above the hurrying crowds, pre- 
sent a target for posterity that wakes the urchin 
in us; we cannot pass them by without hurling 
an occasional stone. An occasional stone I 

I own to a very genuine affection for Mr. 
Bernard Shaw; I cannot, however, always find 
it in my heart to forgive him the madness of 
his pranks. " It was in As You Like It that the 
sententious William first began to openly ex- 
ploit the fondness of the British Public for 
sham moralizing and stage philosophizing. It 
contains one passage that specially exasperates 
me. Jacques, who spends his time, like Ham- 
let, in vainly emulating the wisdom of Sancho 
Panza," — Mr. Shaw forgets that the wisdom 
of Sancho Panza is the wisdom of the Spanish 
peasantry, an accumulation of generations of 
honest toil and thrifty living — ^* comes in 
laughing in a superior manner " — the misin- 
terpretation is Mr. Shaw's; there was nothing 
superior in the laughter of Mr. Fuller Mellish 
when last he played the part; 'twas as whole- 
hearted as a yokel's at the village fair — "be- 
cause he has met a fool In the forest who 

Says very wisely, It is ten o'clock, 

Thus we may see (quoth he) how the world wags. 

20 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

'Tis but an hour ago since it was nine; 
After one hour more 'twill be eleven. 
And so from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe; 
And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot ; 
And thereby hangs a tale. 

Now, considering that this fool's platitude 
is precisely the philosophy of Hamlet, Mac- 
beth ( ' To-morrow and to-morrow, and to- 
morrow,' etc.), Prospero, and the rest of them, 
there is something unendurably aggravating in 
Shakespeare giving himself airs with Touch- 
stone," — a thing Shakespeare never did; he re- 
spected motley as the * only wear ' ; there are 
times in Lear when the fool appears to be the 
only sane man on the stage — " as if he, the Im- 
mortal, ever, even at his subllmest, had anything 
different or better to say himself." Mr. Shaw 
himself is not wholly guiltless; and, mind you, 
he was close onto forty, the age at which Shake- 
speare composed Hamlet, when he penned 
the above. If that * fool's platitude ' is not all 
the wisdom of humanity, (and Mr. Shaw him- 
self has offered us no better explanation of the 
riddle of existence), neither Is it all the wisdom 
of Shakespeare. * Behold,' says the Psalmist, 
' thou hast made my days as it were a span long: 
and mine age is even as nothing In respect of 
thee; and verily every man living Is altogether 
vanity. For man walketh In a vain shadow, 

21 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

and disquieteth himself in vain: he heapeth up 
riches and cannot tell who shall gather them.' 
And again, ' For when thou art angry all our 
days are gone ; we bring our years to an end, as 
it were a tale that is told.' * The ethical view 
of the universe,' says Mr. Joseph Conrad in A 
Personal Record, * involves us at last in so 
many cruel and absurd contradictions, where 
the last vestiges of faith, hope, charity, and even 
of reason itself, seem ready to perish, that I 
have come to suspect that the aim of creation 
cannot be ethical at all. I would fondly be- 
lieve that its object is purely spectacular; a spec- 
tacle for awe, love, adoration, or hate, if you 
like, but in this view — and in this view alone 
— never for despair I Those visions, dehcious 
or poignant, are a moral end in themselves.' 
And again, ' It is sufficient for me to say: J'ai 
vecu. I have existed, obscure among the won- 
ders and terrors of my time, as the Abbe Sieyes, 
the original utterer of the quoted words, had 
managed to exist through the violence, the 
crimes and the enthusiasms of the French 
Revolution.' * Never mind the why and 
wherefore;' we live, to-morrow we die; it is 
not asked of any man that he justify his own 
existence. It is the duty of our fellows to 
make the best possible use of our talents, to 
learn wisdom from babes, to hear platitudes 

22 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

from Mr. Shaw, Shakespeare and the rest. 
Vanitas vanitatum, all is vanity. 



IV 

George Henry Lewes once declared that he 
estimated his acquaintances according to their 
estimate of Boswell. By the same token we 
might judge of the world. And in like man- 
ner it is possible to appraise every poet and 
dramatist since the reign of King James solely 
by what he has written or said concerning Wil- 
liam Shakespeare. It has been necessary for 
me, in writing my play, to read any number of 
volumes bearing directly and indirectly upon 
the Elizabethan drama; and I have made some 
amazing discoveries. Mr. Arnold Bennett, for 
instance, exhibiting the hollowness of his crit- 
ical faculty — his praise of Mr. Conrad's 
Nostromo is a mere following of the herd 
— in the shrill cry of * amateur.' To any one 
at all versed in such matters it is Mr. Ben- 
nett and not Shakespeare who appears to be 
the amateur, though I hesitate to degrade that 
fine old word to such base usage. Could Mr. 
Bennett have conceived the Tragedy of 
Othello, or, being given the story, have writ- 
ten out that final scene, a technical triumph, 

23 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

leading up as it does to what is perhaps the 
finest climax in all literature? But I must let 
Mr. Bennett speak for himself: " I tremble to 
think what the mandarins and William Archer 
would say to the technique of Hamlet, could 
it by some miracle be brought forward to-day 
as a new piece by a Mr. Shakespeare. They 
would probably recommend Mr. Shakespeare 
to consider the ways of Sardou, Henri Bern- 
stein, and Sir Herbert Tree, and be wise. 
Most positively they would assert that Ham- 
let was not a play." But why? Why should 
Mr. Bennett be so positive? What has he 
done to keep alive the memory of William 
Shakespeare that he should write in such wise 
of Mr. Archer and Sir Herbert Tree? I hold 
no brief in Mr. Archer's defence, yet I con- 
sider his notes on Hamlet eminently sane. 
Is it probable that he would change his opinion 
were Hamlet a new play? Is he in the 
habit of indiscriminately praising the Eliza- 
bethan dramatists ? Mr. Bennett had been bet- 
ter advised — his book, The Author's Craft 
(I withhold the obvious pun), was published 
in 1914 — had he trembled to think of James 
Russell Lowell, who, in 1868, wrote: '' Many 
years ago, while yet Fancy claimed that right 
in me which Fact has since, to my no small loss, 
so successfully disputed, I pleased myself with 
24 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

imagining the play of Hamlet published 
under some alias, and as the work of a new- 
candidate in literature." — A manifest impos- 
sibility, as Lowell must have known, since 
Hamlet Is obviously the work of a mature 
genius, grown wise through years of experience. 
— " Then I played, as children say, that it came 
in regular course before some well-meaning 
doer of criticisms, who had never read the orig- 
inal (no very wild assumption as things go), 
and endeavoured to conceive the kind of way 
in which he would be likely to take it. I put 
myself in his place, and tried to write such a 
perfunctory notice as I thought would be likely, 
in filling his column, to satisfy his conscience. 
But it was a tour de force quite beyond my 
power to execute without a grimace." Not so 
with Mr. Arnold Bennett, as we have seen; he 
keeps a straight face while he blackguards the 
man to whom we in England and America owe 
the best of our knowledge of Ibsen, the man 
to whom, as editor of the poems of Alan Seeger, 
we in America are especially indebted. Pos- 
sibly Mr. Bennett is angry with Mr. Archer; 
possibly he has not forgiven him for pointing 
out that, as newspaper plays go. The Earth 
by Mr. James B. Fagan is a better play than 
Mr. Bennett's What the Public Wants be- 
cause * it deals logically with the theme an- 

25 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

nounced, instead of wandering away into all 
sorts of irrelevances,' — such as * making his 
Napoleon of the press a native of the Five 
Towns; ' be that as it may, I am angry with 
Mr. Bennett. Why should he presume to use 
Shakespeare for a stalking-horse? 



And Mr. John Masefield. He takes his cue 
from Mr. William Butler Yeats to such an 
extent that where Mr. Yeats speaks of Henry 
the Fifth, in quotation marks, as ' Shake- 
speare's only hero,' Mr. Masefield must per- 
force go on and reduce the statement to an ab- 
surdity by adding that ' Shakespeare was too 
wise to count any man a hero.' As though men 
were ever that wise, or foolish. To the oaf 
(perhaps) all men are oafs, but to the man of 
vision the greatness of his fellows is as ap- 
parent as the salt of the sea. Faulconbridge, 
Richard the Third, Othello, Lear, Harry Hot- 
spur ; are they not all of heroic stature as surely 
as is the David of Michael Angelo? I do not 
forget Mr. Masefield his puerile reading be- 
tween the lines; but I am so enamoured of the 
prose of Mr. Yeats that I cannot find it in my 
heart to quarrel with his conclusions, though he 
insist, (as he does) , that * the world was almost 

26 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

as empty In the eyes of Shakespeare as it is in 
the eyes of God.' God looked out upon the 
world and found It good. I have an idea that 
Shakespeare was In no haste to leave this vale 
of tears. He was not aweary of the world; 
neither Is God. 

But to return to Mr. Masefield. He says 
of Shakespeare's women: 'The playing of 
feminine roles by boys limited his art and kept 
his women within the range of thought and 
emotion likely to be understood by boys.' 
Limited his art? Just what does Mr. Mase- 
field mean? The Elizabethan was an open-air 
theatre, and plays were presented in the after- 
noon by the light of the sun; it was therefore 
necessary for Shakespeare in writing the Mer- 
chant of Venice, Act V. i. to Invoke before the 
eyes of his audience such a picture of the night 
as would be forever memorable in the litera- 
ture of the world : — 

The moon shines bright: in such a night as this, 
When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees 
And they did make no noise, in such a night 
Trollus methinks mounted the Troyan walls 
And sigh'd his soul toward the Grecian tents, 
Where Cressid lay that night. 

On such a night as well might beggar the arti- 
fice of Mr. Belasco did he venture to reproduce 

27 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

its magic, did young Lorenzo swear his love 
for Jessica. Shakespeare's art knew no such 
formal limitations as does the theatre of to-day. 
So far as we can judge no woman has yet 
sounded the deeps of Juliet's nature; Rosalind 
eludes the cleverest of her imitators; Viola re- 
mains the loveliest heroine that ever graced a 
printed page. 

VI 

But what, as Mr. Shaw once remarked anent 
our actors, are we to think of America, my 
native land, the country that gave credence to 
the Baconian theory? Are we in all honesty 
a nation of villagers, bumpkins at Bartholomew 
Fair, to be taken in by the first glib spieler 
shouting above the clamour of the crowd? In 
1856 a Mr. William Smith issued a privately 
printed letter to Lord Ellesmere, in which he 
put forth the opinion that William Shakespeare 
was, by reason of his birth and upbringing, in- 
capable of writing the plays attributed to him. 
One might as reasonably argue that Lincoln 
was incapable of the Gettysburg Speech, or that 
you, dear reader, cannot speak French since you 
were, unfortunately, born In Yonkers. But the 
delusion did not take on a serious aspect until, 
in the same year, a Miss Delia Bacon put for- 
28 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

ward the same theory in several American 
magazines: her namesake Francis Bacon, and 
not Shakespeare, was the author of the plays. 
In the following year she published a quite un- 
readable book on the subject. She died insane. 
Close on her heels, however, followed an- 
other American, Judge Nathaniel Holmes, with 
a book of no fewer than 696 pages, filled with 
denunciations of the vagabond William Shake- 
speare, who, though he could scarcely write his 
own name and knew no other ambition than 
that of money-grubbing, had appropriated half 
the renown of the great Bacon. Since then my 
fellows this side the seas have published thou- 
sands of volumes upon the subject; the stench 
of their mental rottenness reeks to the doors 
of Valhalla. And yesterday we scaled the 
heights, we reached the summit: a Chicago 
court solemnly handed down a decision confirm- 
ing Bacon's authorship. 



VII 

Why is it that people say, * We know noth- 
ing about William Shakespeare?* Just what 
is it that we do not know? We know when he 
was born and where, his father's name, his 
mother's name, their occupations and their po- 

29 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

sition In society; we know whom he married, 
when, where, and why; what vocation he fol- 
lowed, and how he prospered; where he lived, 
and when and where he died — more, all that 
he thought and did worthy of preservation has 
been preserved for three long centuries, and Is 
to-day cherished as is the work of no other 
man, living or dead; his very name connotes 
more than any other word in our language. 
How can any one say, ' An octavo page would 
contain all our knowledge of him?' Should 
we not include the plays — the tragedies, the 
comedies, the histories — in our knowledge of 
Shakespeare? Do we know more of Mr. 
Roosevelt, or understand him better, because 
for years he has been featured in the press, be- 
cause his face has become as familiar as is the 
caress of a barmaid? I have followed Mr. 
Roosevelt's career with no little interest, have 
even read some of his books, and yet I confess 
myself no better acquainted with him than with 
the rest of humanity's eminent figures. I could 
not for the Hfe of me tell you Mrs. Roosevelt's 
maiden name, whereas every schoolboy has 
heard of Anne Hathaway In Shottery-side. 
What Mr. Roosevelt thinks of Shakespeare re- 
mains, for me at least, as great a mystery as the 
riddle of the Sphinx, and is of about as much 
Importance ; whereas I know what Shakespeare 

30 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

would have thought of Mr. Roosevelt: he has 
painted his portrait full-length In Harry Hot- 
spur, outspoken, impulsive, avid of honour, the 
popular Idol par excellence, the man who set 
Bolingbroke upon the throne only later to revolt 
against him and go down in defeat vainly striv- 
ing to overthrow his reign; he was, as is Mr. 
Roosevelt, a hero after the heart of Merrle 
England and Young America, and as such 
Shakespeare loved him and overlooked his 
many faults. 

VIII 

He, Shakespeare, is one of my intimates. I 
can think of no one, with the possible exception 
of Mr. Shaw, who has so permeated my life 
with the genius of his personahty. Can It be 
that I know nothing of a man with whom I am 
as well acquainted as ever I was with my father, 
simply because I cannot be certain whether he 
dined at the Mermaid or the Devil Tavern on 
Sundays, and where and with whom he slept o' 
nights? Such details are of no Importance; 
and, even though they were, Shakespeare was 
right In preserving a certain amount of secrecy 
with regard to his amours. When Heine said 
of de Musset, ' He is a young man with a 
splendid past,' he dismissed de Musset as a 

31 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

man with a future; but Shakespeare had no 
past; if ever a man died to rise again, if ever 
a man was born lord of the after-ages, 'twas 
this same Will of Stratford-town. Those in 
search of tattle may turn to George Moore and 
the decadent poets and painters from whom he 
has taken his cue; for my part, I see something 
of the nobleness of Shakespeare's character in 
this very reticence of his — and this is scarce 
an attribute of dramatists, reticence: Jonson 
wearied Drummond, while his guest at Haw- 
thornden for two weeks, by talking almost in- 
cessantly of himself; Mr. Shaw's first preface 
was mainly about Mr. Shaw, and he has spent 
the remainder of his life living up to that pref- 
ace. I do not agree with Mr. Moore that 
after twenty-four an artist's affairs of the heart 
are but so much raw material for literature. 
If we cannot immortalize our loves save by 
dragging them into the confessional and there 
shouting so loudly concerning our intimacies 
that all the congregation hears and is most 
improperly shocked, we are unworthy any 
woman's love, be she courtesan or queen, we 
are the merest braggarts, like pimps we would 
fatten on her shame and should be rudely 
silenced. Surely it is a kindlier fate that has 
befallen the Dark Lady of the Sonnets than 
ever fell to the lot of any other woman kissed 
32 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

by any other poet since Pan first piped in Ar- 
cady; I'll warrant she is not jealous of your 
inamorata, or of mine. 



IX 

And who was this same Dark Lady of the 
Sonnets? In his preface Mr. Shaw says that 
he has identified her, very reluctantly, with 
Mistress Mary Fitton. Of course, he has done 
nothing of the sort; 'tis, as the critics would 
say, but another of his jokes. He has named 
a weak wailing creature of his fancy Mary; he 
had as well boast that he has identified the Dark 
Lady with the Mother of Christ. 'Tis not 
Mistress Fitton that cries for mercy from out 
the pages of his book: we are too well ac- 
quainted with her, thanks to Thomas Tyler, to 
be deluded by any such sham christening. And 
yet Mr. Shaw was present, as it were, at the 
birth of the Fitton theory; he went so far 
as to quote to Thomas Tyler from Euphues 
Golden Legacie. He has indeed since gone to 
even greater lengths — he has made of Thomas 
Tyler a truly fascinating figure, a specialist in 
pessimism, delighting in a hideous conception 
which he was pleased to call the Theory of 
Cycles, according to which the history of man- 

33 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

kind and the universe keeps on repeating itself 
without the slightest variation throughout all 
eternity; he had a goitre, and, according to his 
theory, he and that goitre have been haunting 
this earth of ours for thousands and thousands 
of years; may he, on his next visit to us, derive 
as great pleasure from Mr. Shaw's preface 
as I have derived, through Mr. Shaw, from 
my so short acquaintance with himself 
as he was In the flesh. I cannot do 
better than to quote from his edition of the 
Sonnets — I was lucky enough to pick up a copy 
at second-hand in Washington; it is very rare: 
" The dark lady of the Sonnets has been com- 
pared with Cleopatra. Thus Professor Dow- 
den: * May we dare to conjecture that Cleo- 
patra, queen and courtesan, black from " Phoe- 
bus' amorous pinches," a *' lass unparalleled," 
has some kinship through the imagination with 
the dark lady of the virginals?' And the 
queenly commanding qualities of Mistress Fit- 
ton are not to be mistaken. Her character in 
its strength (Sonnet CL, line 7), resembles that 
of her royal mistress who declared, ' I have the 
heart of a king, and of a king of England, too.' 
She could, on occasion, as we learn from Mrs. 
Martin, In a document In the Record Office, tuck 
up her clothes, take off her head-dress, and, at- 

34 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

tired In a large white cloak, march off ' as though 
she had been a man ' to meet the Earl of Pem- 
broke outside the court. It is entirely in accord- 
ance with Mrs. Martin's description that Mis- 
tress Fitton takes the lead at the masque and 
dance at Blackfriars, and that she it is who asks 
EHzabeth to dance, telling her that her name is 
Affection." And a very pretty picture we get 
of her there at that dance; at the marriage of 
Anne Russell, the queen's favourite maid of 
honour, to Lord Herbert; a very pretty pic- 
ture, — even Miss Agnes Strickland seems to 
have been taken with it: "After supper, the 
mask came in, and delicate it was to see eight 
ladies so prettily dressed. Mrs. Fitton led; 
and after they had done their own ceremonies, 
these eight lady-maskers chose eight ladies 
more to dance the measures. * Mistress Fit- 
ton went to the queen and wooed her to 
dance. Her majesty asked the name of the 
character she personified; she answered, ''Af- 
fection.'* ** Affection!" said the queen; "af- 
fection's false"; yet her majesty rose and 
danced.' " And if a queen could not refuse her 
entreaties, what of a poor player? We cannot 
connect her directly with William Shakespeare, 
yet I think that Sir Sidney Lee, the might- 
iest of the scoffers, will not to-day deny that her 

35 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

name Is forever linked with Shakespeare's; there 
has been controversy enough pro and con to im- 
mortalise a dozen light o' loves. 

And she makes a very pretty picture on the 
stage, so why should I apologise for Introducing 
her Into my play? Or, Indeed, why should Mr. 
Shaw? Why should he be In such haste to ac- 
cept the later suggestions of Mr. Arthur Ache- 
son? They are the merest cobweb-spinning. 
'' In Henry IV, Part I," says Mr. Acheson, 
" the relations of the Prince and Falstaff reflect 
Southampton's Intimacy with the witty but un- 
principled Florio." Mr. Acheson has not an 
Iota of proof to offer for any such statement; 
and why he should speak of Florlo as either 
witty or unprincipled only Mr. Acheson knows. 
" My hostess of the tavern," he continues in the 
same absurdly Achesonlan manner, *' Is," If you 
please, " the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, Mis- 
tress Davenant of the George Inn," with whom, 
according to Mr. Acheson, both Shakespeare 
and Southampton were in love. Listen then, 
Henry IV, Part I, Act I, 2, to the Prince's 
first mention of Mistress Quickly, the Prince re- 
flecting the feelings of Southampton In love: 
" Why, what a pox have I to do with my hostess 
of the tavern?" Surely we cannot afford to 
have anything more to do with her, or with Mr. 
Acheson, after that. 

36 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 



For centuries, as Sir Henry Newbolt points 
out in his admirable New Study of English 
Poetry, a controversy, always ardent, often- 
times violent, has raged concerning the Classi- 
cal and Romantic in Art. The impersonal 
theory, with the prestige of a Greek ancestry, 
had at first undisputed possession of the field; 
but it was never more than a theory. In prac- 
tice the Greek artist, like every other human 
artist, expressed in his work the intuitions of his 
own spirit. But this was not the account of him 
given by contemporary critics; his sole aim, ac- 
cording to them, was to produce a certain effect 
upon his audience. A work of art, they argued, 
according to Professor Butcher in his edition of 
Aristotle's Poetics, should be * a realisation 
of its own idea,' and so objectively perfect. 
But, as Sir Henry asks, is a poem or a picture a 
living personality that it should have an idea of 
Its own, and so * realise ' that Idea? Such 
playing with words Is not only futile but dan- 
gerous. AlIce-Through-the-Looklng-Glass is 
not a thing In the Red Queen's dream, but a 
dreamer herself. And the theory is impossible 
In practice. Professor Mackall, in his Oxford 
Lectures, after telling us that * the pure Greek 

37 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

mind was the least romantic of all in history,' 
and that in the Iliad and Odyssey ' the personal 
note is as completely absent as it can possibly be 
from any piece of human workmanship/ goes 
on to make admissions which show that the pos- 
sibility is far from being complete. The Iliad is 
' instinct with a certain ardour from beginning 
to end ' ; * this ardour is what sets it apart from 
all other poetry.' In the Odyssey there are 
personal touches eloquent of personal experi- 
ence. When we read of the poor maidservant 
in Ithaca who had to go on grinding corn all 
night, we know that there is here ' a touch of 
something actual that had come to the poet him- 
self and struck sharply through him the sense 
of the obscure labour and unsung pain that un- 
derlie the high pageant of life, war, and adven- 
ture.* Later he speaks of the ' incommunica- 
ble personal quality which Theocritus brought to 
poetry,' and in his Introduction to the Greek 
Anthology he traces the development of the psy- 
chological element down to Meleager. 

Though the Greek theory never quite dies 
out, the practice of artists everywhere has given 
it * the lie direct' The influence of M. Ana- 
tole France has done much to discredit it 
among the younger critics. For centuries the 
first sonnet of Sidney's Astrophel and Stella 
has been the credo of the poets: — 

38 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

Loving 'In truth, and fain in verse my love to show, 
That she, deare Shee, might take some pleasure of 

my paine — 
Pleasure might cause her reade, reading might make 

her know, 
Knowledge might pitie winne, and pitie grace ob- 

taine — 
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe, 
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertaine, 
Oft turning others' leaves, to see if thence would 

flow 
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sun- 

burn'd brain. 

But w^ords came halting forth, wanting Invention's 

stay: 
Invention, Nature's childe, fled step dame Studie's 

blowes : 
And others' feet still seemed but strangers in my 

way. 
Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my 

throwes. 
Biting my trewand pen, beatlnge myselfe for spite — 
Fool, said my Muse to me, looke in thy hearte and 

write ! 

But, as has been said, this is poetry, not argu- 
ment; what of the controversy? In one of his 
Conversations with Eckermann, Goethe said: 
* The style of a writer is a true impression of 
his Inner self, If any one would write a clear 
style, let him first have clearness in his own soul; 

39 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

and if any one would write a great style, let him 
see to it that he have a great character.' In 
another Conversation he put it even more 
strongly: ' It is the personal character of the 
writer that brings his meaning before his read- 
ers, not the artifices of his talents.' And 
again : ' The artist must work from within 
outwards, seeing that, make what contortions he 
will, he can only bring to light his own individu- 
ahty.' Joubert was even more dogmatic: 
* Objects should never be described except for 
the purpose of describing the feelings they 
arouse in us, for language ought to represent at 
the same moment the thing and the author, the 
subject and the thought; everything that we say 
ought to be dyed with us, with the soul of us.' 
We are reminded of Coleridge's ' infallible test 
of a blameless style — its untranslateableness in 
words of the same language without injury to 
the meaning; language is framed to convey not 
the object alone, but likewise the character, 
mood, and intentions of the person who is repre- 
senting it' 

XI 

What then of Mr. John Masefield's criti- 
cism of Love's Labour's Lost? " The play 
is full of the problem of what to do with the 
40 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

mind. Shall It be filled with study, or spent in 
society, or burnt In a passion, or tortured by 
strivings for style, or left as It is ? Intellect Is a 
problem to Itself. Something of the problem 
seems (It would be wrong to be more certain) to 
have made this play not quite Impersonal, as 
good art should be." Not quite impersonal! 
All good art Is Intensely personal, is autobiogra- 
phy, the record of the adventures of one's mind 
in a world of dreams. I confess I cannot un- 
derstand Mr. Masefield. Here is a poet with a 
personal vision, an Individual viewpoint, a mes- 
sage of his own, a message that resounds 
throughout the English-speaking world, align- 
ing himself with the most unimaginative of the 
commentators. Turning his back upon the old 
free life that formed his character, denying the 
gods of wind and wave that nursed his infant 
muse, he sells his heritage for a mess of profes- 
sorial homage, accepts without question the 
dicta of the theorists; Holofernes prosing his 
prattle before the mightiest dreamer born of 
woman. 

Love's Labour's Lost is, as Dr. Brandes 
has pointed out, a play of two motives. The 
first Is, of course, love — what else should be 
the theme of a youthful poet's first comedy? 
The second is language, poetic expression for Its 
own sake — a subject round which all the medi- 

41 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

tatlons of Shakespeare must have centred, as, 
in the midst of new impressions, he set about the 
formation of a vocabulary and a style. 

Mr. Masefield has misread Love's Labour's 
Lost. It was Shakespeare's intent to satirise 
the over-luxuriant and far-fetched modes of ex- 
pression that were characteristic of his age and 
of ours: — 

HoLOFERNES: The posterior of the day, most gen- 
erous sir, is liable, congruent and measureable for 
the afternoon: the word is well cull'd, chosen; 
sweet and apt, I do assure you, sir; I do assure. 

while Biron cries: — 

Lend me the flourish of all gentle tongues, — 
Fie, painted rhetoric! 

Mr. Masefield's theories concerning Shakes- 
peare are, if the truth be known, not his own, 
but Mr. Yeats' or those of the Cambridge edi- 
tors. And yet make what contortions he will, 
assume the most owlish and scholarly of expres- 
sions, we see, beneath the lion's fell, * a very 
gentle beast' Mr. Masefield cannot escape his 
own personality. He comes away from Shakes- 
peare unchanged. Years later he writes of the 
Anzac Expedition with a verbal grandiosity that 
is rather sickening, that belies the mute heroism 
of the men who fought and died so bravely bat- 
42 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

tling vainly against the Turks. As Mr. Francis 
Hackett points out, in a recent review of Mr. 
Masefield's work, he (Mr. Masefield) too often 
attempts to be a little nobler than life. * A 
great writer takes beauty by the hand.' In the 
Tragedy of Nan Mr. Masefield is too lofty, 
strutting among the stars, as it were, on stilts; 
he seems to be carried away by the glamour of 
his subject; he cannot write as people speak. 
But why? Apparently because he believes that 
there are phrases lovelier than life, more ex- 
quisite than nature, more Instinct with romance 
than Is humanity. It was to ridicule any such 
credo that Shakespeare wrote the greater part 
of Love's Labour's Lost: — 

Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise, 

Three pil'd hyperboles, spruce affectation, 

Figures pedantical: these summer-flies 

Have blown me full of maggot ostentation. 

I do forswear them; and I here protest, 

By this white glove, (how white the hand, God 

knows, ) 
Henceforth my wooing mind shall be express'd 
In russet yeas, and honest kersey noes. 

True the parody Is often as tedlouj as the 
mannerisms It would ridicule, — but Shakes- 
peare was young. Not until A Midsummer 
Night's Dream do we find him rising to the 
full height of his genius. And what a rise It 
43 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

was, Illumining the world ! Surely his sun has 
never set since the dawn that followed that night 
in June. 

XII 

Professor KIttredge, In the address referred 
to, ridicules rather roughly, or so It seems 
to me, those who profess to discover something 
of Shakespeare's personality in his plays. " If 
Hamlet is Shakespeare, so also Is Claudius, and 
so are Banquo and Fluellen, Falstaff and Prince 
Hal. . . . All are authentic, all are genuine, all 
are sincere. . . . Each, therefore, contains 
some fragment of Shakespeare's nature, or reg- 
isters some reaction of his idiosyncrasy. That 
Is most certain. But how shall we tackle this 
stupendous problem In biochemistry?" Who 
said 'Hamlet Is Shakespeare?' Shakespeare 
stands sponsor for Hamlet, for Falstaff, for 
Prince Hal, as Mr. Shaw for his Candida, or 
for Anne, Shaw's Anne, and his alone. The 
professor Is destroying a monster of his own 
creation, " a compendium of humanity, a com- 
posite photograph, quite destitute of salient fea- 
tures, which," as he says, " Is assuredly not 
Shakespeare." And yet Shakespeare was the 
creator of this * compendium of humanity.' 
Reflected there we see the heart of him, * great 
44 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

with child to speak.' As every wayside flower 
lifts up Its head to sing In praise of God, so 
Falstaff, Lear, Dogberry, Brutus, Caliban and 
all the rest tell all day long of that great soul 
that yearned them Into being. I cannot do bet- 
ter than quote Sir Henry Newbolt In support of 
my contention that the poet who exhibits so In- 
tense an Interest in the personality of others, not 
only in his plays, but in his sonnets : — 

What is your substance, whereof are you made 
That millions of strange shadows on you tend? 

who knew that none could say more of his be- 
loved — • 

Than this rich praise that you alone are you; 

would have been the last man In this world, born 
king of so limitless a realm as the fair field of 
his fancy, to forego his heritage and live self- 
exiled In his art. 

" It is a matter of common agreement that 
Shakespeare the Dramatist had a power that 
may be called Infinite and hidden: Infinite, be- 
cause It Is exhibited In a whole world of life: 
hidden, because it Is exhibited only through the 
Inhabitants of that world and never apart from 
them. But to add to this the words * impas- 
sive ' and 'Impersonal' (as Flaubert does) Is 
a violent contradiction In terms. Activity and 

45 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

personality cannot be found anywhere in a 
higher degree than in Shakespeare's combina- 
tion of creative force and ingenuous artistic con- 
centration. He does not, as does Flaubert, 
treat men as he would treat mastodons or croco- 
diles for a museum; he does not stuff them with 
straw; what he puts into them is that which is in 
himself, the breath of his own vitality. So 
strong is the impression which he thus produces 
that critics like Dr. Brandes have believed it 
possible to trace in his works not only the move- 
ment of his spirit, but the actual footprints of 
his external life. Others, finding always in his 
characters exactly what they find in the charac- 
ters of the world around them, imagine that 
there must have been over and above all these, a 
Shakespeare of whose character no record is 
left, a Shakespeare who succeeded in concealing 
himself. But Shakespeare's ingenuous concen- 
tration is the reverse of an attempt at conceal- 
ment; it is the negation of a pose, a self-disguise, 
an adopted point of view. If he had a wider 
and more comprehensive vision of human life 
than Byron or other poets, if he treated it more 
tolerantly and was more completely absorbed in 
the study of it, that is only to say that he had a 
different and more intense personality." 



46 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 



XIII 

Professor Kittredge draws a lively sketch of 
King Claudius — ' who has fared hard at the 
hands of the morahsing critics and the actors ' 
— superbly regal, confronting an armed mob 
with serene disdain, silencing the rash and dan- 
gerous Laertes with a glance, sympathizing with 
Ophelia, divided from herself and her fair rea- 
son, ' without the which we are pictures or mere 
brutes ' ; * the same Claudius who could not pray 
because his intellect was so pitilessly honest that 
self-deceit was beyond his power; the same 
Claudius who faced his own damnation, know- 
ing he was the son of wrath because he could not 
give up his crown or his queen, and was too sub- 
lime to juggle with his conscience.' The pro- 
fessor draws a lively sketch of King Claudius, 
and then jeers at those who see, or say they see, 
something of the creator in such a creation. 
And yet we know the professor could not have 
painted the portrait of the king. There is, for 
one thing, too much of the schoolma'am about 
him. Shakespeare was not a Pharisee; he was 
tolerant of humanity; he lavished the best of his 
art upon Dame Quickly : — 

Tllly-fally, Sir John, ne'er tell me; your ancient 
swaggerer comes not in my doors. I was before 

47 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

Master Tisick, the debuty, t'other day; and, as he 
said to me, 'twas no longer ago than Wednesday last, 
' r good faith, neighbour Quickly,' says he ; Master 
Dumbe, our minister, was by then ; ' neighbour 
Quickly,' says he, ' receive those that are civil ; for,' 
said he, ' you are in an ill name ! ' Now a' said so, 
I can tell whereupon; 'for,' says he, 'you are an 
honest woman, and well thought on; therefore take 
heed what guests you receive ; receive,' says he, ' no 
swaggering companions.' There comes none here; 
you would bless you to hear what he said; no, I'll 
no swaggerers. 

He put into the mouth of Pistol as vaunting a 
phrase as man ever uttered : — 

Why, then the world's mine oyster, 
Which I with sword will open. 

The natural tendency of his youth had been to 
see good everywhere, even (perhaps) in Claud- 
ius. He felt, with his King Henry, that * there 
is some soul of goodness in things evil.' But as 
he matured the misery of life presented itself be- 
fore him in all the abject awfulness of its real- 
ity; it seemed to appal him. There was the 
social problem, the problem of what one should 
do, must do for one's neighbour; it seemed to 
weigh upon his heart: — 

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are. 
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, 

48 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, 
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you 
From seasons such as these? 

The later Shakespeare could not jest concerning 
the weakness, the folly, the sin of another as 
lightly as did the young man new come to town. 
It was especially the potency of evil that im- 
pressed him; the selfishness, be it ever so regal, 
which brought so much woe into the world. It 
was on compulsion, because my Lord Chamber- 
lain's company was running behind Henslowe's, 
— Henslowe who did not risk public favour 
with Hamlet and Julius Caesar, — that he made 
of Measure for Measure a comedy, but he him- 
self did not laugh. Victorien Sardou wrote a 
tragedy. La Tosca, upon the same theme. 
It was, as Dr. Brandes has pointed out, clearly 
his Indignation at the growing Pharisaism in 
matters pertaining to sexual morality that at- 
tracted Shakespeare to so unpleasant a parable. 
He was in earnest, however; though the pit 
rocked with laughter, he was as earnest as is 
Mr. Shaw, and surely only a fool will deny the 
purpose in the latter's plays. What fascinated 
Shakespeare in Hamlet, though more partic- 
ularly in Macbeth and Othello, was to 
show how evil, having injected some of Its 
poison into a man's veins, slowly infects the 
whole man. We see him, with most of the illu- 

49 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

sions of his youth gone, brooding over this sub- 
ject in the later tragedies. He had, of course, 
recognised it earlier; in Richard the Third, 
for instance, but Richard is the same man from 
beginning to end. Macbeth is a study in moral 
degradation; lago is a villain without a peer in 
literature — he even deceives us to-day and we 
know him for what he is, the man who sold his 
friend for his own advancement. 

Claudius — of course, it fares hard with him 
at the hands of the moralists as it fared hard 
with him in life, or rather, at Shakespeare's 
hands; but he is a secondary character, scarce a 
study in progressive depravity. Only a profes- 
sor, with all the lovely heroines to choose from, 
would take him as a text on which to preach con- 
cerning Shakespeare. He is, of course, fin- 
ished, detailed, a wonderful characterisation; 
this goes without saying, since he is Shakes- 
peare's; but when the curtain rises he is already 
the rottenest thing in Denmark, and when he 
dies, he dies unrepentant, the fool of his lust, 
foredoomed to disaster. He may have had a 
good angel about him, but, as Falstaff said of 
his page, ^ the devil outbid him.' 

The professor defends Claudius against his 
traducers. This is very noble and very unneces- 
sary. But when he says that because we cannot 
identify Shakespeare with Claudius, we cannot 

50 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

see anything of Shakespeare in Claudius he is 
... I have a friend, a very literary friend, who 
once triumphantly pointed out to me that there 
was a world of difference between Jack Tanner, 
pursued and married apparently somewhat 
against his will by the wholly delightful, quite 
irresistible Ann, and his creator Mr. Shaw, 
since the latter managed to remain a bachelor 
until long after his fortieth year. One might as 
well argue that we who have only read Miss 
Julia know nothing of Strindberg simply because 
we have not shared his bed and board. The ex- 
ternals of life, the physical adventures of exist- 
ence are, in large part, accidental, quite beyond 
our control; the adventures of one's mind are a 
true index to one's character, and they vary as 
we vary; they make us what we are. 'Tis a 
trite aphorism, but true enough for my purpose : 
A man is as he thinks. And, as I have said, we 
know what Shakespeare thought. 

Bobby Burns was a poet, not a ploughboy; he 
would still have been a poet had he been born in 
Boston and educated at Harvard under Profes- 
sor Kittredge. 

XIV 

The professor insists that we * can never 
read the riddle of another's personahty,' can 

51 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

never understand our fellows, but must live on, 
isolated, only by the merest chance and in the 
commonest affairs of life sympathising with our 
friends. All art is a refutation of any such 
statement. What Is Hamlet but just such 
an interpretation of another as he deems im- 
possible? Does not Falstaff, with his page at 
his heels, walk before us for all the world ' like 
a sow that hath overwhelmed all her litter but 
one ? ' Is he not a living creature, almost as 
immortal as the gods, as real as you or I ? Can 
we not hear the tones of Harry Percy's voice, or 
the laughter of Jaques In the forest of Arden? 
And what is criticism ' but a reading of the 
riddle of another's personality ' ? 'Tis no 
* idle revery,' as the professor would have us 
believe, ' dignified with the name of biographic 
fact.' Biography has nothing whatever to do 
with it. Boswell understood Johnson, and his 
understanding took no account of the accidents 
of time and place. Shakespeare understood 
Antony and as he sat at his table writing again 
the tale of the huge proconsul's love for Cleo- 
patra, he lived over in his mind the years of his 
own life when such another as the imperial 
gypsy of the Nile held him In thrall, the willing 
slave of her caprice. Why should the profes- 
sor wish to dispense with all that has been read 
between the lines of Shakespeare's plays? I 

52 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

grant you he does not understand Shakespeare, 
but why should he mock at those who do? Or 
set himself up against the saner of the critics to 
overthrow their discoveries with a careless wave 
of the hand? 'Of all methods and ideals in 
the study of Shakespeare's dramas, the most 
desperately wrong is that which seeks, exclu- 
sively or principally, to discover the man in his 
works.' And to prove it, he proves that 
Shakespeare is not Claudius or lago or Lear or 
Rosalind. 

But he fears we may think him ' malicious ' 
in his selection of Claudius and lago and the rest 
as ' representative ' of Shakespeare, and to 
repel any such insinuation puts forward Pistol. 
He quotes what he considers ' an outrageous 
example of frantic PIstolese ' : — 

Shall pack-horses 
And hollow pamper'd jades of Asia, 
Which cannot go but thirty mile a day, 
Compare with Caesars and with Cannibals, 
And Trojan Greeks? Nay, rather damn them with 
King Cerberus — and let the welkin ring! 
Shall we fall foul for toys? 

Here, according to the Professor, we have 
*the real Shakespeare,' ('who loved words 
for their sound, and not for their sense alone — 
otherwise he could not have been a poet ') , ' lux- 

53 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

uriating in pure prodigality of vocal reverbera- 
tion — borrowing Gargantua's mouth — angli- 
cising honorificabilitudinitalibus.' And then, 
some more of his Latin — haec fahula docet 
and hie et ubique — and he asks : * Have I not 
proved my point? ' 

We are such stuff 
As dreams are made on; and our little life 
Is rounded with a sleep. 

The words are simple, common, such as a 
child might use, such as Shakespeare loved. In 
Synge's plays, as Mr. C. E. Montague has re- 
marked, the English of the Elizabethans seems 
to have come back to us from Ireland almost as 
fresh as it was when the Elizabethan settlers left 
It there; it is the English of the King James' 
Version, straightforward, lithe and clean — 
' Isn't it a pitiful thing when there's nothing left 
of a man who was a great rower and fisher but 
a bit of an old shirt and a plain stocking? ' and, 
again, when the mother whose six sons are dead, 
says: * It's a great rest I'll have now, and it's 
time surely ' ; and * I won't care what way the 
sea is when the other women will be keening.' 
Keats was haunted day and night by Edgar's 
question : * Hark ! canst thou not hear the 
sea ? ' ' Beauty like sorrow dwelleth every- 
where,' is as fine as anything in Ben Jonson. 
54 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

There is but one greatly poetic phrase in Stephen 
Phillips' Poems, (The Woman with the Dead 
Soul, etc.), where Lazarus rising from the dead 
hears how ' the sea murmured again ' ; there is 
little in tragedy more beautiful than Giovanni's 
line ' I did not know the dead could have such 
hair.' Is it the thought or the sound that 
makes these words memorable? 

The professor should read Hazlitt's essay, 
in Table Talk, on Familiar Style ; I quote from 
a note in the first edition: ' I have heard of 
such a thing as an author, who makes it a rule 
never to admit a monosyllable into his vapid 
verse. Yet the charm and sweetness of Mar- 
low's lines depended often on their being made 
up almost entirely of monosyllables.' Hazlitt 
had been objecting and rightly to Dr. John- 
son's style because there was no discrimination, 
no selection, no variety in it, none but ' tall, 
opaque words ' taken from the ' first row of 
the rubric,' — words with the greatest num- 
ber of syllables, such words as the professor 
would have our genuine poets employ to the 
virtual exclusion of Mr. Kipling's virile Anglo- 
Saxon, to the practical extinction of Mr. Shaw's 
trenchant and simple English. * If a fine style 
depended on this sort of arbitrary pretension, 
it would be fair to judge of an author's ele- 
gance by the measurement of his words, and 

55 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

the substitution of foreign circumlocutions 
(with no precise associations) for the mother- 
tongue.' Hazlitt was eminently sane. ' The 
proper force of words lies not in the words 
themselves, but in their application.' Though 
we are, according to R. L. S., ' mighty fine fel- 
lows ', we can none of us write like William 
HazHtt; that we are 'mighty fine fellows' is, 
according to Henley, a ' Great Perhaps,' that 
we can none of us write like Hazlitt merely 
mdubitable. The professor apparently does 
not agree with Hazlitt. But then, why should 
he? There are two sides to every argument. 
Mr. Cradock of Gumley, a friend of Johnson's 
— ' of all the men I ever knew Dr. Johnson 
was the most instructive ' — tells in his Me- 
moirs, which were printed In 1826-28, many 
amusing anecdotes, among them several con- 
cerning Goldsmith. It Is from him that we 
get the oft-repeated lament: 'while you are 
nibbling about elegant phrases, I am obliged to 
write half a volume ' ; and hear first of Gold- 
smith's delightful proposition for Improving 
Gray's Elegy by putting out ' an idle word in 
every line.' As thus : — 

The curfew tolls the knell of day, 

The lowing herd winds o'er the lea, 

The ploughman homeward plods his way, — 

s6 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

and so forth. Lord Lytton, so I learn from 
Mr. Austin Dobson, in an excellent article in 
the Edinburgh Review, Ingeniously exploded 
this piece of profanation by shearing down 
Shakespeare's ' gaudy, babbling, and remorse- 
less day,' on the same principle, to a bare * the 
day.' I would not have my readers think all 
adjectives superfluous; some men are fools and 
dullards, others merely malicious, crying out 
against Nineveh because her women are beau- 
tiful. 

XV 

The professor is most unfortunate in his quo- 
tation, but still more so in his comment. The 
talk of the braggart Pistol, (the swaggerer to 
whom Dame Quickly objected), is an anthology 
of playhouse bombast. He Is not only highly 
amusing in himself, but has given Shakespeare 
an opportunity to gird at the ' prodigality of 
vocal reverberation,' the robustious style of the 
earlier tragic dramatists, a style repulsive to his 
finer poetic sensibilities. He parodies Mar- 
lowe's Tamburlalne In the outburst quoted by 
Professor KIttredge. It occurs in Henry 
IV, Part II, Act II, 4, * the finest tavern scene 
ever written,' according to Mr. Masefield, an 
admitted authority on such scenes. In Tam- 

57 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

burlalne, Second Part, Act II, 4, the passage 
runs : — 

Hallo, ye pamper'd jades of Asia, 

What? Can ye draw but twenty miles a day? 

Further on, in the same scene, he makes fun of 
George Peele's Turkish Mahomet and Hyren, 
the fair Greek, when Pistol, alluding to his 
sword, exclaims, 'Have we not Hyren here?' 
And again it is Peele who is aimed at when Pis- 
tol says to the hostess : — 

Then feed and be fat, my fair Calipolis; 
Come give's some sack. 

Si fortune me tormente, sperato me contento. 
Fear we broadsides ? no, let the fiend give fire : 
Give me some sack : and, sweetheart, lie out there. 

[Layinff his sword on the table] 
Com.e we to full points here ; and are etceteras noth- 
ing? 

In the Battle of Alcazar, Muley Mahomet 
brings his wife some flesh on the point of the 
sword and says : — 

Hold thee, Calipolis, feed and faint no more! 

In the course of a scholarly essay on Dr. 
Johnson's Writings, Sir Leshe Stephen says: 
" * The style is the man ' is a very excellent 
aphorism, though some eminent writers have 
lately pointed out that Buffon's original remark 

58 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

was * le style c'est de rhomme/ That only 
proves that, like many other good sayings, it 
has been polished and brought to perfection by 
the process of attrition in numerous minds, in- 
stead of being struck out at a blow by a solitary 
thinker. From a purely logical point of view, 
Buffon may be correct: but the very essence of 
an aphorism is that slight exaggeration which 
makes it more biting whilst less rigidly accurate. 
According to Buffon, the style might belong to a 
man as an acquisition rather than as a natural 
growth." Boswell has somewhere a discussion 
as to the writers who helped to form Johnson's 
style, whereas Johnson, like all other men of 
strong individuality, formed his style as he 
formed his legs — * buffeting with his books.' 
And In like manner the style of William Shakes- 
peare was formed; listening to the brilliant talk 
of his contemporaries, reading the wonderful 
translations then being issued from the press. 
The hopes, the aspirations, the romance of the 
age took seed and flowered in the secret places 
of his heart. 

And nothing Is so evident as the Impression 
made by the gorgeous and violent rhetoric of 
Marlowe upon the mind of the youthful Shake- 
speare. Marlowe's Influence Is unmistakable in 
Titus Andronlcus and the early histories, not 
only In the style and versification, but in the lav- 

S9 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

ish effusion of blood through which we wade 
ankle-deep. Shakespeare's Aaron and Peek's 
barbarous Muley Mahomet are cousins, the off- 
spring of the Jew of Malta and his henchman 
Ithamore. It is probable that Shakespeare was 
later somewhat ashamed of his spring madness 
and took an early opportunity of ridiculing the 
traducers of his youth. 

And the professor? To paraphrase Henley, 
we have all of us listened long enough to the 
professor on Shakespeare; the everlasting pity 
of it is that we shall never listen to Shakespeare 
on the professor. He (the professor) must 
think of personality as of something about as in- 
tangible as oil-cloth, and of poetry as words 
' full of sound and fury signifying nothing.' 

XVI 

There has been born into this world but one 
man capable, had he lived to maturity, of oust- 
ing William Shakespeare from his place upon 
the heights ; and that man was Christopher Mar- 
lowe, the son of a cobbler in Canterbury. He 
was a foundation scholar at the King's School 
in his native town; matriculated at Cambridge in 
1580; took the degree of B.A. in 1583, and of 
M.A. at the age of twenty-three after he had 
left the University. He appeared In London 
60 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

(so we gather from an old ballad) as an actor 
at the Curtain Theatre, but had the misfortune 
to break his leg upon the stage, and was, no 
doubt on this account, compelled to give up 
acting. His first dramatic work, Tamburlaine 
the Great, seems to have been written, at latest, 
in 1587. He has a special claim upon our 
affections ; he belongs to the glorious company of 
those who have died young — Chatterton, 
Keats, Shelley, Byron, Dowson, Rupert Brooke, 
Alan Seeger and Richard Hovey, our own 
Hovey, as Seeger is ours for all that he died 
fighting for France. We may well believe Mr. 
Bliss Carman when he tells us : 

Oh, but life went gaily, gaily, 
In the house of Idiedally. 

And it went gaily with young Marlowe, for 
he was a son of the morning. As Lowell has 
said, ^ he brought the English unrhymed penta- 
meter (which had hitherto justified but half its 
name by being always blank and never verse) to 
a perfection of melody, harmony, and variety 
which has never been surpassed.' He was a 
titan struggling magnificently against old gods 
and outworn superstitltons, such another as 
Prince Lucifer, the Lord of Light; and standing 
on the summits of Parnassus, he casts a shadow 
across the after-ages which only the sun of 

61 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

Shakespeare can lighten. It would be impos- 
sible to overestimate his value as a leader and 
pioneer in English poetry. Algernon Charles 
Swinburne, himself a poet, and one of the ablest 
of the many critics who have written concerning 
the art and culture of the Elizabethan era, says, 
in his article in the Encyclopoedia Brittanica: 
*' To no other poet have so many of the greatest 
among poets been so directly indebted; nor was 
any great writer's influence upon his fellows 
more utterly and unmixedly 'an influence for 
good. He first, and he alone, guided Shake- 
speare in the right way of work; his music in 
which there is no echo of any man's before him, 
found its own echo in the more prolonged but 
hardly more exalted harmony of Milton. He 
IS the greatest discoverer, the most daring and 
inspired leader, in all our poetic literature. Be- 
fore him there was neither a genuine blank verse 
nor a genuine tragedy in our language. After 
his arrival the way was prepared, the paths were 
made straight for Shakespeare." 

And Marlowe was Shakespeare's senior by a 
scant three months. He died in the twenty- 
ninth year of his youth, beloved by all the gods 
on high Olympus, mourned for centuries in 
every land where European culture is known or 
spoken of. He was stabbed, so tradition has it, 
in the eye with his own dagger, wrenched from 
62 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

his hand by a certain Francis Archer, his rival 
in amour; they had quarrelled over a servlng- 
mald. 

XVII 

Mr. Shaw, however, confidently asserts that 
had he been born In 1556 (thereby antedating 
Marlowe by eight years) Instead of 1856, he 
would have taken to blank verse and given 
Shakespeare a harder run for his money than all 
the other Elizabethans put together; Mr. Shaw 
who Is about as daring as the humour of Punch, 
whose affair with Melpomene was broken off on 
account of his friendship for Mrs. Warren. 
Mr. Shaw Is a writer of prose as witness the 
speeches he has put Into the mouth of his young 
poet Marchbanks In Candida. I am always 
amused by Mr. Shaw's efforts of serious Intent, 
his wild raging before the gods we others have 
erected In the temples of Apollo, the gods we re- 
fuse to remove or replace with such common- 
place images as he deems lovely, usually some 
practical variant of the golden calf. I am by 
no means ashamed of being accused of a lack of 
humour. God wot, there is no lack of It In this 
world where thousands jest daily In the face of 
almost certain destruction. I shall Interpret 
Mr. Shaw's arrogant self-praise literally. It Is 
of the essence of Shaw and his middle-class — 

63 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

nothing IS so middle-class as the constant as- 
sumption of superiority — his middle-class atti- 
tude towards all that Is Inspiring and beautiful 
In human history. He scoffs at ' gentle Jesus, 
meek and mild,' (while Miss Rebecca West 
hails him 'a spiritual teacher'), as 'a sniv- 
elling modern invention, with no warrant In the 
gospels.' Whereas, as Mr. Frank Harris has 
pointed out, it was Jesus who first in all the 
world advised us to turn the other cheek, and to 
give the cloak to the robber who had taken the 
coat. Does he not teach us to do good to our 
enemies? How does the Sermon on the Mount 
begin? ' Blessed are the poor In spirit.' We 
cannot mistake his meaning; he strikes the same 
note again : ' Blessed are the meek, for they 
shall Inherit the earth.' As a pioneer, a leader 
in the vanguard of thought, Mr. Shaw takes 
rank, not with Marlowe, but with the man who 
discovers a skeleton In his closet, writes a thesis 
on the subject, and hopes to deliver a lecture at 
the Bodleian, thereby adding to our knowledge 
of anthropology. What Mr. Shaw, In all prob- 
ability, could have done In Elizabethan England, 
he has done In the England of to-day: satirised 
the fads and the follies of the butcher, the baker, 
the candlestickmaker, and worked himself up 
into something of a passion over the ' Idolatry ' 
of Shakespeare's admirers. He has taken his 

64 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

cue from his master Ben Jonson. They are as 
like as an Englishman and an Irishman well can 
be, and still retain some traces of their national- 
ity. Jonson had an idea that he could rail 
the public into approbation; Mr. Shaw — well, 
the Poetaster reappears generations later as 
Fanny's First Play. Jonson wrote very 
learnedly of the use of cosmetics during the 
reign of the Roman Tiberius; Mr. Shaw quotes 
long paragraphs to uphold his references to Cle- 
opatra's cure for baldness. Both depict Csesar 
with a sense of humour: Mr. Shaw's Cassar 
and Cleopatra, and the tragedy of Catiline, 
Act V, 6, where Caesar hands over to Cato (who 
has openly accused him of receiving secret mes- 
sages from the conspirators, even in the Senate) 
the letter containing declarations of love not 
from Catiline, but from Servilia, Cato's sister. 
Thereby they (Mr. Shaw and Ben Jonson) 
differ radically from Shakespeare, whose Caesar 
is as serious and pompous as a midwest con- 
gressman. Mr*. Shaw is by all odds the most 
interesting, perhaps the finest figure in England 
to-day; but his knowledge of sociology is no 
more original or startling than was Jonson's 
knowledge of the classics. Indeed there is, as 
I have hinted, a strange analogy between the 
two. Neither one has kept to the high level of 
his earliest achievements; Jonson's work no- 

65 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

tlceably deteriorated after Bartholomew Fair, 
Mr. Shaw has failed to live up to the fine 
promise of Candida or Man and Superman. 



XVIII 

Professor Dowden has somewhere said that 
had Shakespeare died at forty, the world might 
have mourned his loss, but would certainly have 
been consoled in the thought that he had 
reached his zenith; no man could surpass Ham- 
let — and then, in rapid succession, followed 
Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, Cymbeline, 
A Winter's Tale, The Tempest. Neverthe- 
less Mr. Shaw is convinced that Shakespeare 
was very like himself. This is reducing 
Shakespeare to an absurdity. Is it always 
in terms of Mr. Shaw that the men and 
women of this world are to be judged? Be- 
cause he cannot coin words but must resort to 
tablets and notebooks in order that he may treas- 
ure up for future use the chance phrases dropped 
by the careless folk with whom he brushes el- 
bows, is Shakespeare to be depicted upon the 
stage as a * mere snapper-up of inconsidered 
trifles ' ? Mr. Shaw himself expressly states 
that Shakespeare was not Autolycus. Why 
then this Jonsonian wail against the age into 
66 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

which he was born, the posterity that can never 
hope to understand either Shakespeare or him- 
self? Is it not a disparagement of Shakes- 
peare's genius to place him in company with a 
common Beefeater, and then put into the mouth 
of the latter the more exquisite phrases, to por- 
tray Shakespeare hanging upon the words of a 
warder? Does Mr. Shaw know nothing of 
Elizabethan England? Is it possible that he 
has not heard of the extent of Shakespeare's 
vocabulary? An Italian opera libretto contains 
at most eight hundred words; a well educated 
Englishman will rarely use more than three or 
four thousand; there are but fifty-six hundred 
and forty-two in the Old Testament; whereas 
Shakespeare employed more than fifteen thou- 
sand words in his poems and plays alone. He 
lived in an age of expansion and splendour, an 
age of high lights and total eclipse; life was a 
great adventure then; men sailed away across 
uncharted seas toward unknown coasts and re- 
turned, if at all, rich beyond the dreams of a 
school-girl. We to-day, to quote Lowell again, 
cannot read Hakluyt's voyages (much less 
Henry IV) without amazement to find com- 
mon sailors habitually using a diction that rises 
at times, as they tell of their wanderings, to well- 
nigh Homeric beauty and power. The English 
language has deteriorated and Mr. Shaw is at a 

67 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

disadvantage; he needs must write while Eng- 
land, at a loss for words, raving in Billingsgate, 
fights for air. There are no more Raleighs. 
Lloyd-George is as unheroic as the Wales from 
which he hails. There is a gap between the 
speech of books and that of Hfe. Walter Pater 
laid himself open to the charge of writing Eng- 
lish as though it had been a dead language; and 
indeed, so far as poetry is concerned, it is almost 
as dead as Latin. How then should Mr. Shaw, 
a satirist without a peer, without a fairyland, 
who vows he can see nothing in the heavens at 
night save ' stars higgledy-piggledy every which 
way,' who refers to Fletcher as ' a facile blank 
verse penny-a-liner,' a puritan bordering upon 
old maidishness, how should Mr. Shaw hope to 
speak for Shakespeare? He cannot recreate 
the past save in his own Image, how then should 
he summon from the grave the recreant soul of 
a dreamer and bid him walk as In the flesh be- 
fore the wondering eyes of man — man so 
prone to believe in resurrected ghosts? There 
is but one Shakespearean touch in the whole 
affair, preface and play, and that Is the taking 
over wholesale by Mr. Shaw of another's situa- 
tion. But what a situation! Shakespeare, 
who cared no more for the queen than I do, 
madly protesting love for her, utterly oblivious 
of the livery that in reality weighed upon his 
68 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

shoulders as heavy as did the albatross about 
the neck of the Mariner; the livery which he, at 
the first plausible opportunity, threw off, pre- 
ferring provincial trade and life with a woman 
eight years his senior, eight thousand years his 
mental inferior, to all the plaudits of the pit 
gained under license such as is to-day allowed a 
dog. 

XIX 

I have said elsewhere that I believe William 
Herbert — the Earl of Pembroke, to whom the 
First Folio Edition of Shakespeare's plays was 
dedicated by the editors Heminges (the reputed 
creator of the role of Falstaff ) and Condell, life- 
long friends of Shakespeare and members with 
him of the Lord Chamberlain's company of 
players — to have been the Mr. W. H. of the 
Dedication, the Mr. W. H. whom Thomas 
Thorpe, the publisher, describes as ' the only 
begetter of these insuing sonnets,' and to whom 
the major portion of the Sonnets was ad- 
dressed. It is only right that I, who have been 
so bold in my arraignment of others, should give 
some reason for so believing, though there be 
reason enough in all conscience without further 
debate on my part. Let me go back to the be- 
ginning and quote Mr. Havelock Ellis, to some 

69 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

extent my literary godfather and, as such, stand- 
ing sponsor for no end of my literary sins — as 
Bobby Service has it, * the other kind don't mat- 
ter,' though I have a character somewhat re- 
sembling Mr. Shaw's in that it needs a good 
deal of looking after. 

In that sanest and best of all of to-day's 
books, Affirmations, in the book of which I 
make quite as good use as many another man 
doth of ' a death's head or a memento mori,' 
Mr. Havelock Ellis remarks, inter al: " In 
literature, as elsewhere, art should only be ap- 
proached as we would approach Paradise, for 
the sake of its joy. It would be well, indeed, if 
we could destroy or forget all that has ever been 
written about the world's great books, even if it 
were once worth while to write those books 
about books. How happy, for instance, the 
world might be if there were no literature about 
the Bible, if Augustine and Aquinas and Calvin 
and thousands of smaller men had not danced on 
it so long, stamping every page of it into mire, 
that now the vision of a single line, in its simple 
sense, is almost an effort of inspiration." How 
happy the world if every man might judge of 
Shakespeare for himself as he would of a friend, 
his mind unbefogged by the casual comments of 
some high-school instructor concerning Hamlet, 
Othello, Lear or the man himself. Mr. Gouv- 
70 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

erneur Morris knows Conrad and says of those 
who are now engaged in reading him for the first 
time — * Oh, how I envy them ! ' But we can- 
not read Shakespeare for the first time ; he has 
already been read to us when we were far too 
young to understand. He has become as much 
a part of our civilisation as is the sun; all the 
novelty has been worn from his lines by the fin- 
gering of an almost endless line of annotators; 
the beauty of his verse is lost amid the droning 
voices of his interpreters. And yet sometimes, 
as we turn the pages of his books, the splendour 
of his humanity seems to dawn upon us anew; 
and what an adventure it is to come upon his 
lines thus suddenly, as though for the first time ! 
Those are red-letter days indeed, ushered in by 
music such as the seraphs use. " All my life 
long," continues Mr. Ellis, " I have been casting 
away the knowledge I have gained from books 
about literature, and from opinions about life, 
and coming to literature itself or to life itself, a 
slow and painful progress towards that Heaven 
of knowledge where a child is king." 



XX 

I am a farmer in Southern Maryland, and 
have been lucky in that I have been unable to 

71 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

read the books about literature to which Mr. 
Ellis refers, have been unable to listen to opin- 
ions concerning life ; I have had little leisure. I 
have been busy with life; I left Cornell in my 
Freshman year, cooked in an all-night restaurant 
in Klamath Falls, tended sheep camp, herded 
horses, rode for a season on the range in North- 
ern Montana and again in Eastern Oregon, laid 
pavement for the Warren Construction Com- 
pany, surveyed for the Government. Until a 
few years ago when I happened to take down 
from among my books Mr. Shaw's Dark Lady 
of the Sonnets, I had never heard of the contro- 
versy raging around the impassive figure of the 
sonneteer. I come to literature and to life 
with an open mind. I never was a decadent. I 
do not have to disabuse my brain of foregone 
conclusions. I have not spent years listening 
to the dry-as-dust arguments of scholasticism 
concerning a poet who was once as alive as is 
Mr. Cohan to-day, who should be met as one 
goes out to meet a distinguished guest, and not 
relegated to the laboratory for dissection by sci- 
entists. A word may be sufficient for the wise 
— perhaps they already know all you or I have 
to tell. Myself I am still young and eager to 
learn. So I read Mr. Shaw's preface and fell 
in love with Thomas Tyler; then I read the play 
and fell out with Mr. Shaw. So I reread the 
72 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

preface. I came to where he quotes the one 
hundred and thirtieth sonnet. Imagine, says 
Mr. Shaw, imagine Mary Fitton reading that 1 
And I tried to imagine just how she would feel, 
— with what success, you who read my play are 
best able to say. 

But I was interested in Mistress Fitton and in 
Thomas Tyler; and I became interested in 
Shakespeare entirely apart from his work as a 
dramatist, interested in the humdrum everyday 
life of the man and his neighbours. As luck 
would have it, I studied first Mr. William Arch- 
er's edition of Dr. Brandes' William Shake- 
speare; for years I have had an immense admi- 
ration for Dr. Brandes. Then I bought more 
books on the subject than I could well afford — • 
I had to write a play to recoup my fallen for- 
tunes. I have bought Sir Sidney Lee's various 
volumes on the Elizabethans; I have bought 
practically everything I could lay my hands on. 



XXI 

Sir Sidney Lee has written a life of Shake- 
speare; some say the life of Shakespeare; be 
that as it may Sir Sidney Lee differs radically 
from Boswell concerning just what it is that con- 
stitutes a life. For us (thanks to Boswell) Jon- 
73 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

son Is a living, thinking, sentient creature, a con- 
temporary; Sir Sidney Lee cuts Shakespeare up 
into a mass of data, speaks of him as I might of 
some catalogue in the British Museum, some 
mummy dead and done with concerning whom a 
student may wax erudite without fearing contra- 
diction from the less learned average of human- 
ity. Sir Sidney Lee refers to Marlowe as cas- 
ually as Billy Sunday does to God, and with 
about as much exactitude. — You remember Mr. 
Kipling's Tomllnson who patted his god on the 
head. He (Sir Sidney Lee) doubts the Mann- 
Ingham Anecdote which I quote In my Dram- 
itis Personae, and accepts as authentic the tradi- 
tion of Marlowe's violent end; there is as much 
truth, and no more, in the one account as in the 
other. '^ Tamburlalne, the Jew of Malta, Dr. 
Faustus and Edward the Second were among the 
best applauded productions through the year 
1594." Why the year 1594, the year following 
Marlowe's death? Why not 'of the age'? 
Were they all written in one year? Both parts 
of Tamburlalne were entered In the Station- 
ers' Register on August 14, 1590; the first part 
of the play was probably produced three years 
before, the second part in 1588. Dr. Faustus 
was acted early In 1589. The earliest mention 
of the Jew of Malta occurs In Henslowe's 
Diary, where a performance of the tragedy is 

74 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

noted as taking place on February 26, 1592; 
but it is Implied that the play was not then new; 
its composition is conjecturally placed about 
1590. If Sir Sidney Lee is going to stoop to 
quibbling in his debates on the vexed subject of 
the Sonnets, is going to refer to Dr. Brandes' 
William Shakespeare as ' a rather fanciful 
study,' he should himself adhere more closely 
to the truth. 

XXII 

And the truth is Sir Sidney Lee Is not much of 
a critic. He is a patient reader of old docu- 
ments, a careful compiler of all sorts of statis- 
tics, all sorts of twice-told tales ; but if you really 
desire to meet with Shakespeare turn to the 
Sonnets or the plays, and not to Sir Sidney 
Lee. 

For Instance, he does not believe Lord Wil- 
liam Herbert to have been the Mr. W. H. of the 
Dedication and to prove It (Thorpe's edition of 
the Sonnets Is dated 1609) states that the Earl 
of Pembroke was spoken of as Lord Herbert 
In 1 60 1 and referred to as the Earl of Pem- 
broke thereafter; to have addressed him as 
* Mr.' would have been a star-chamber offence. 
He then goes on to prove that Thorpe cared 
very little whether he offended or not. It has 

75 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

been suggested that Ben Jonson referred to 
Thorpe's inscription in his dedication of the 
Epigrams to the Earl of Pembroke : ' While 
you cannot change your merit, I dare not 
change your title. . . . When I made them I 
had nothing in my conscience to expressing of 
which I did need a cipher;' implying thereby 
that some one, presumably as I have said the 
reckless Thorpe, had referred in some similar 
dedication to the Earl of Pembroke as other 
than My Lord, or as plain Mr. W. H., employ- 
ing a cipher — initials — to conceal in some 
sort his connection with an unauthorized edition 
of another's work, i.e. the pirated publication of 
Shakespeare's sonnets. Jonson, one of Shake- 
speare's intimates and a friend of Pembroke's, 
naturally knew the inside story of this transac- 
tion. William Hall, a publisher, who ' flits rap- 
idly across the stage of literary history ' was * in 
all probability,' according to Sir Sidney Lee, 
*the Mr. W. H. of Thorpe's Dedication of 
the Sonnets,' since he it must have been who 
procured for Thorpe the manuscript, since he 
was a personal friend of Thorpe's, — the vari- 
ous volumes they published issued from the same 
press, the press of George Eld, a printer at the 
White Horse, in Fleet Lane, Old Bailey, Lon- 
don. Now it does not seem to me that this is a 
very good reason for believing them to have 

76 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

been fast friends. And why should Hall, who 
between 1609 and 16 14 published some twenty 
volumes, turn so valuable a manuscript as that of 
Shakespeare's Sonnets — Shakespeare was very 
probably even then spoken of as the most Im- 
portant poet of the day — over to Thorpe who 
in the same period of time was able to publish 
but twelve volumes ? And they would seem to 
have had but little In common; Hall published 
nothing but sermons, displays of heraldry, theo- 
logical essays; Thorpe published Marlowe's 
Lucan, Jonson's Volpone, three plays by 
Chapman, a volume on Epictetus, another on St. 
Augustine, and he was at one time the owner of 
the manuscript of Marlowe's Hero and Lean- 
der. Further we can connect him directly with 
the Earl of Pembroke; he dedicated two vol- 
umes to him — St. Augustine of the City of 
God . . . Englished by L H., 16 10, and a 
second edition of Healey's Epictetus, 16 16. 
We can almost connect him with Shakespeare, 
through Marlowe whom one edited and the 
other quoted, through the Sonnets, and through 
Thorpe having dedicated Epictetus his Manual 
to Shakespeare's Intimate friend John Florlo. 
Sir Sidney Lee speaks of Thorpe as though he 
thought of him as one might of some half-fed 
vagabond; he seems to me to have been of the 
tribe of Burns — 'twas unsuccess not failure that 

77 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

dogged his steps; he was apparently a lover of 
fine books; his own dedications, however flam- 
boyant and rhetorical, are written according to 
the general high-flown usage of the age and 
prove nothing to the contrary: all antiquarians 
and bibliomaniacs are not writers of exquisite 
prose. He gives as his reason for dedicating 
Healey's unprinted manuscripts to Florio and to 
the Earl of Pembroke the fact that they had 
been patrons of Healey before his expatriation 
and death. This is exactly the reason given by 
the editors of the First Folio for their dedi- 
cation of the plays to the Earl of Pembroke. 
He was a great patron of the arts. Why then 
should he have wished his name withheld in the 
instance of the Sonnets? Surely the contents of 
the Sonnets are reason enough; and as surely 
he was * the only begetter ' of them. He prob- 
ably turned the manuscript over to Thorpe. It 
was quite natural that the friend to whom the 
Sonnets were addressed should hesitate In allow- 
ing hi^ name to be publicly connected with them : 
they tend to prove him too surely the false 
friend. And yet were he a lover of literature, 
as he seems to have been, as he must have been 
to have been Shakespeare's dearest friend, con- 
scious of the honour of Shakespeare's earlier es- 
teem, of his love before the Dark Lady came be- 
tween them, jealous for Shakespeare's fame In 

78 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

later years to come, he would scarcely hope for 
the destruction of the manuscript; he would 
countenance the publication of the Sonnets and 
continue to play the role of patron. And he 
was a patron of Shakespeare's, not unknown to 
Thorpe. 

XXIII 

" From the dedicatory epistles addressed by 
Shakespeare to the Earl of Southampton In the 
opening pages of his two narrative poems, 
Venus and Adonis (1593), and Lucrece 
( 1594) 5 from the account given by Sir William 
D'Avenant, and recorded by Nicholas Rowe, of 
the Earl's liberal bounty to the poet, and from 
the language of the Sonnets," it Is, according to 
Sir Sidney Lee, abundantly clear that the Son- 
nets were dedicated to my Lord of Southamp- 
ton. There Is no Internal evidence in the Son- 
nets tending to prove that they were dedicated 
to Southampton rather than to Pembroke; the 
contrary indeed, one might refer to Pembroke 
as * sweet boy ' ; Southampton appears to have 
been always grown-up. And the tale recounted 
by Nicholas Rowe In 1709 Is the merest hearsay, 
idle gossip '' that my Lord Southampton at one 
time gave him (Shakespeare) a thousand 
pounds to go through with a purchase which he 

79 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

heard he had a mind to." It is not probable 
that Shakespeare at any time considered a pur- 
chase involving a thousand pounds more than he 
had cash in hand; he was an exceedingly careful 
trader, warned off from debt by the failure of 
his father. We will grant that Venus and 
Adonis and Lucrece were dedicated to 
Southampton, but in 1593 and 1594; the Son- 
nets date from 1598 and 1599, and there is no 
evidence to prove that Southampton was then 
Shakespeare's patron. Shakespeare did not 
approve of the tactics of Southampton and his 
friends during the late nineties. He wrote 
Julius Caesar to bring home to them and to 
others the folly of half-baked rebellions, and 
portrayed in the character of Brutus the tragedy 
of Essex, as fine a figure as graced the Eliza- 
bethan pageant, an infinitely greater than Ral- 
eigh. But with Southampton he (Essex) went 
to the Tower — they had attempted to incite the 
rabble against the Queen. They failed miser- 
ably, more miserably even than did Brutus, Cas- 
sius and the rest. However it is to Essex (and 
not to Southampton) that Antony's fine words 
refer; he had deserved a better fate; he was one 
of the great noblemen of all time; while still a 
lad of twenty he deposed Raleigh, a man of 
forty, from his high place in the queen's affec- 
tions, — as captain of the guard, Raleigh had to 

80 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

stand at the door with drawn sword, In his 
brown and orange uniform, while within Essex 
whispered to the spinster of fifty-four things 
which set her heart beating. He was extremely- 
daring, and early developed great qualities of 
which he had at first (perhaps) given no 
promise. 

XXIV 

" No contemporary document or tradition 
suggests that Shakespeare was the friend or pro- 
tege of any man of rank other than Southamp- 
ton." Sir Sidney Lee is willing to believe 
D'Avenant on the word of Nicholas Rowe, writ- 
ing a hundred years after the publication of the 
Sonnets, yet doubts the word of Heminges and 
Condell, Shakespeare's associates on the stage 
and his first editors, and dismisses their dedica- 
tion to Pembroke — who, together with his 
brother, * prosequted ' both the plays, * and 
their Authour living, with so much favour ' — 
as but so much childish prattle. This Is Sir Sid- 
ney Lee's method, and suits his mood. How- 
ever, we can connect Shakespeare with Lord 
William Herbert. His father's company of 
players produced Shakespeare's first plays — 
The True Tragedle of Richard Duke of York 
and Titus Andronicus, and very probably 

8i 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

others: the first and second parts of Henry 
VI. Sir Sidney Lee has never had a play pro- 
duced; I know I shall be everlastingly grateful 
to the man who produces mine; I shall consider 
him a patron of sorts. 

Granted then that we can connect Shake- 
peare early in his career with the House of Pem- 
broke. In 1593 Lord Pembroke's servants, his 
company of players, were in financial difficulties 
and soon disbanded; shortly afterwards the old 
Earl, broken in health, retired to the country. 
Here, on his family's ancient estate, young Wil- 
liam Herbert grew to manhood. He was born 
April 8, 1580, and came to London early in the 
spring of 1598. It is to be presumed that, like 
all the young gentlemen of his age, he fre- 
quented the theatre. What more natural than 
that he should take an especial interest in 
Shakespeare, once his father's protege, now the 
leading and most successful, most popular dram- 
atist of the day? What more natural than that 
Shakespeare should be drawn to the brilliant 
and charming son of his old patron? An inti- 
macy sprang up between them. The Sonnets 
were its natural outcome. 

And Mistress Fitton is just such another as 
the Dark Lady bodied forth in Shakespeare's 
verse. She was the mistress of my Lord Her- 
bert : a bastard son was born to them ; no end of 

82 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 



XXV 

letters were written back and forth, imploring 
and repudiating marriage. 

But enough of argument; doubtless it wear- 
ies you. I have however an especial fondness 
for such subjects as are debatable. The great 
facts of the world are not subject to question — 
the sun, the moon, the stars, man's right to 
come and go in peace about the earth unhar- 
assed by the tyranny of emperors or of priests. 
— And yet, it may be, there comes a time for 
reaffirming the simple eternal truths of life, 
such a time as the present when the nations in 
their wrath with fury unexampled rewrite, in 
letters of blood and iron the principles of one 
common creed. There are, however, a number 
of things — * just why the sea is boiling hot ' — 
we might discuss amicably; it seems the sheer- 
est nonsense to quibble concerning the strange 
conclusions of wilful Englishmen. And yet, 
if one is at all interested, one must be partisan. 
I do not envy Professor Raymond MacDon- 
ald Alden, the editor of the Variorum Edition 
of the Sonnets, his inability to come to any sort 
of conclusion concerning them. To admire the 
Sonnets at all Is to have some curiosity concern- 
ing Mr. W. H., some Interest In T. T. the pub- 

83 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

Usher, some admiration for the ' dark lady of 
the virginals.' 

How oft, when thou, my music, music play*st 
Upon that blessed wood whose motion sounds 
With thy sweet fingers, when thou gently sway'st 
The wiry concord that mine ear confounds, 
Do I envy those jacks that nimble leap 
To kiss the tender inward of thy hand 
Whilst my poor lips, which should that harvest reap, 
At the wood's boldness by thee blushing stand ! 

To be so tickled, they would change their state 
And situation with those dancing chips. 
O'er whom thy fingers walk with gentle gait. 
Making dead wood more blest than living lips. 
Since saucy jacks so happy are in this, 
Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss. 

As I have said, I am a farmer with a predi- 
lection for pigs; I cannot pass a pen of Berk- 
shires without enquiring into their antecedents; 
I prefer Hampshires to most poetry; and yet, 
perhaps because I have given years of study to 
such matters I can unhesitatingly appraise their 
worth. Will any agree with me? Mr. Hun- 
gerford, down the river, maintains that so far 
as the ordinary farmer is concerned * plain 
hog' is good enough; while Mr. Bliss is all 
for the Chester White. We each have our 
own notions. But is this true as regards so 
important a matter as the genius of Shake- 

84 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

speare? Not at all; we are willing to accept 
the say-so of any and every pamphleteer. By 
personal experience we learn what we know of 
poultry, taking the teachings of the experts at 
their face value, accepting their theories cum 
grano sails. But, though we may have been as- 
sociated for years on the most intimate terms 
with William Shakespeare, we can never make 
up our own minds concerning him. We always, 
with Professor Alden, beg the question or show 
no interest in the matter whatsoever. What 
have we, farmers and clerks and brokers, to do 
with the most human of the poets? I cannot in 
so many words state my judgment concerning 
him, neither can I confine my knowledge to an 
octavo page. He still eludes me, baffles me, 
thwarts my best efforts to have at him. And 
I think that is, in large measure, his eternal 
charm. What other dramatist could you study 
at school, read in the library, and view at the 
theatre with the awed interest we all of us ex- 
hibit at an even passably decent presentation of 
Hamlet or Lear or Othello? On the after- 
noon of May loth, 1897, Mr. Bernard Shaw 
was present at Mr. Charrington's production 
of Ibsen's A DolPs House; in the evening he 
found Hamlet at the Olympic ' not a bad ano- 
dyne after the anguish of the Helmer house- 
hold.' Throwing off the critic — thank 

85 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

Heaven, it is no longer necessary to criticize 
Shakespeare — he indulged a ' silly boyish af- 
fection ' of his for the play, which he knew 
nearly by heart, thereby having, as he points 
out, a distinct advantage over Mr. Nutcombe 
Gould, the producer. I myself remember 
Petruchio (Mr. F. R. Benson) fifteen years 
ago at Stratford-on-Avon in my earliest 
youth; I remember Mr. Otis Skinner (with 
Miss Ada Rehan) in the part a year or two 
later; then Mr. Sothern, and Mr. Eric Blind 
with Miss Margaret Anglin. The play is 
crude, slapstick farce, by no means the best of 
Shakespeare, and yet it has, for me at least, an 
interest surely equalling that of Mr. Shaw — 
Mr. Shaw who so maltreats my beloved Mar- 
lowe in the preface to The Admirable Bash- 
ville that I am almost ready to come to blows 
with him — He speaks of him elsewhere as a 
fool expressing his folly in blank verse ; ' the 
moment the exhaustion of the imaginative fit 
deprives him of the power of raving, Marlowe 
becomes childish in thought, vulgar and wooden 
in humour, and stupid in his attempts at in- 
vention.' Mr. Shaw can forgive him nothing 
on account of his youth. Judged by the same 
standard, placed against the accumulated wis- 
dom and wit of the ages, at twenty-nine, Ibsen 
is even more futile; Mr. Shaw himself a non- 
86 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

entity. I am almost ready to come to blows 
with him, and then he paraphrases the ' mighty 
lines ' : — 

This is the face that burnt a thousand boats 
And banished Cashel Byron from the ring — 

SO pathetically that I can only pity him in his 
prosaic fumbling with politics and birth con- 
trol while all the beauty of the world lies 
stretched in limitless glory before his sightless 
eyes. I forgive him as I forgive John Payne 
his 

What has become of last year's snows ? 

translation of Villon's perfect 

Mais ou sont les neiges d'anton? /^ 

They know not what they do. 



XXVI 

Where are the snows of yesteryear? Where 
those old valiant spirits that gathered at the 
Mermaid, drank deep of mine host's ale, and 
regaled each other with famous tales of prow- 
ess in camp and court? Has Marlowe kissed 
his lady on the lips? Is Jonson now at peace 
with all the world? Has Chapman walked 

87 



AIRY NOTHINGS 

with Homer about the walls of Troy? Are 
they leaning from the parapets of Heaven to 
watch us, dressed in simpler garb, the pageant 
faded forever from the streets, going about 
our less adventurous tasks? Has the smoke 
of battle found them where they hide? Have 
they thrilled to a slaughter unequalled save in 
the wanton horrors of their imaginative 
dreams? They were intrigued by every 
breath of scandal, delighted by the oaths of 
every scheming blackguard — are they laugh- 
ing approval above the welter of blood that 
darkens Europe? They were in love with all 
that was adventurous, reckless, young in life 
and literature. I wonder are they jostling el- 
bows with the holy prophets of whom Synge 
wrote : — 

If the mitred bishops seen you that time, they'd 
be the like of the holy prophets I'm thinking, do be 
straining the bars of Paradise to lay eyes on the 
Lady Helen of Troy, and she abroad, pacing back 
and forward, with a nosegay in her golden shawl. 

I'll warrant they, the Persons in my Play, 
are more interested in her than in their golden 
crowns. The beauty of Helen reflected for- 
ever in the epics of Homer is an immortal 
splendor; a crown but a tawdry symbol of 
impotence menaced by every roisterer on the 

88 



OR WHAT YOU WILL 

street. We go about their England calling in 
vain to them; their inns are gone, their homes 
deserted, only their singing and their laughter 
endures throughout the years. It is a better 
thing to dream than to rear cities on the sands 
of time. 

All passes. Art alone 
Enduring stays to us; 
The bust outlasts the throne. 
The coin Tiberius. 



89 



MARY! MARY! 
A PLAY IN ONE ACT 



* Mould us our Shakespeare, sculptor, in the form 
His comrades knew, rare Ben and all the rout 
That found the taproom of the Mermaid warm 
With wit and wine and fellowship, the face 
Wherein the men he chummed with found a charm 
To make them love him; carve for us the grace 
That caught Anne Hathaway in Shottery-side, 
The hand that clasped Southampton's in the days 
Ere that dark dame of passion and of pride 
Burned in his heart the brand of her disdain, 
The eyes that wept when little Hamnet died, 
The lips that learned from Marlowe's and again 
Taught riper lore to Fletcher and the rest, 
The presence and demeanour sovereign 
At last at Stratford calm and manifest, 
That rested on the seventh day and scanned 
His work and knew it good, and left the quest 
And like his own enchanter broke his wand.' 

Richard Hovey. 



MARY! MARYl 

PERSONS IN THE PLAY 

MARY FITTON : 21 years of age, young- 
est child of Sir Edward Fit ton, Kt., of Gaws- 
worth in Cheshire, a maid of honour at the 
court of Elizabeth; of medium stature, slender 
and graceful, with raven black hair and glowing 
expressive eyes; a woman, daughter of Eve, aU 
luring, ensnaring, tyrannical, ^ athirst for ad- 
miration to such a pitch of wantonness that she 
cannot refrain from coquetting on every con- 
ceivable occasion; born to deal out rapture and 
torment with both hands, the very woman to 
set in vibration every chord in a poet's soul/ 
Shakespeare must have admired her wit and 
daring, her presence of mind and her capricious 
wayward fancy. Doubtless she was to him 
what Maria Fiammetta, the natural daughter 
of a king, was to Boccaccio, She brought into 
his life, the life of a poor player, a breath from 
a higher world. It was she who made the first 
advances as did Rosalind in As You Like It. 
Who shall doubt that Shakespeare's Sonnets, 
passed in manuscript from hand to hand, were 
not later translated into Orlando's verses and 

93 



MARYl MARYl 

hung upon the trees about the forest of Arden? 
Who can tell how much of her personality lives 
on in Beatrice, Viola, and the imperial gypsy of 
the Nile? 

EDWARD FITTON: 28 years of age, 
her brother; tall and gangling, his awkwardness 
contrasts sharply with his sister* s madcap ways, 
as does his complexion with hers, for he is fair, 
with shallow blue eyes, and a blond moustache; 
he was created a baronet in 161J. 

FRANCIS: 4^ years of age, a drawer at 
the Mermaid. 

HIS ASSISTANTS. 

HENRY CHETTLE : 63 years of age, a 
publisher living at Christ Church Gate. ^^ In 
Dekkar's tract, A Knight's Conjuring, dating 
from 160J, he figures among the poets in Ely^ 
sium, where he is introduced in the following 
terms: ^ In comes Chettle sweating and blow- 
ing, by reason of his fatness; to welcome whom, 
because hee was of olde acquaintance, all rose 
up, and fell presentlie on their knees, to drinck 
a health to all the lovers of Hellicon* Elze 
has conjectured, possibly with justice, that in this 
puffing and sweating old tun of flesh, who is so 
whimsically greeted with mock reverence by the 
whole gay company, we have the very model 
from whom Shakespeare drew his demigod, the 
immortal Sir John Falstaff, beyond comparison 

94 



MARY! MARY! 

the gayest, most concrete, and most enter- 
taining figure in European comedy J' — Georg 
BrandeSy — William Shakespeare. 

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 35 years 
of age, actor and dramatist, author of Romeo 
and Juliet, Venus and Adonis, the Rape of Lu- 
crece, and other poems of passion; lover to MiS' 
tress Fit ton. In the diary of John Manning- 
ham, of the Middle Temple, the following entry 
occurs, under the date March 13, 1602: 
^' Upon a tyme when Burhidge played Rich. 3, 
there was a citizen grone so farr in liking with 
him, that before shee went from the play shee 
appointed him to come that night unto her by the 
name of Ri: the 3. Shakespeare overhearing 
their conclusion went before, and was inter- 
tained ere Burbidge came. Then message being 
brought that Rich, the 3d was at the dore, 
Shakespeare caused returne to be made that Wil- 
liam the Conquerour was before Rich, the 3. 
Shakespeare's name was William.'' And, quite 
in keeping, Burbage's was Richard. 

BEN JONSON: 26 years of age, poet and 
dramatist; strong and massive in body and mind, 
coarse-grained and swaggering, delighting in the 
fierce animal spirits of the ancients, with a 
minute knowledge of their life and religions. — 
It has become a commonplace of criticism to re- 
fer to him as ' manly,' and yet he was despite 

95 



MARY! MARY! 

his airs of independence, a Tory poet and court- 
flatterer, one who wasted his best efforts in the 
creation of masques and pageants for the pe- 
dantic King James, He could, however, at 
times rise to the supreme st heights of altruism; 
as witness: — Marston and Chapman (the 
Rival Poet of the Sonnets) having been im- 
prisoned for certain jibes at the Scotch, which 
had been brought to the notice of the king, in 
the comedy of Eastward Ho! and it being re- 
ported that they were in danger of having their 
noses and ears cut off, Jonson, of his own free 
will, claimed his share in their responsibility 
and joined them in prison. And he had a 
mother worthy of such a son. At a supper 
which he gave shortly after the liberation 
of himself and friends, she clinked glasses 
with him and showed a paper containing 
poisonous powders which she had intended mix- 
ing with his drink, had he been sentenced to 
mutilation; adding that she would not have sur- 
vived his death, but would have taken her por- 
tion of the draught. — And yet he has been 
accused of jealousy, the sheerest libel; no saner 
tribute to Shakespeare has ever been penned 
than that in Jonson^s famous lines. In all the 
length and breadth of English drama he is sec- 
ond only to Shakespeare, and this is no small 
praise. — He was a posthumous child, son of a 

96 



MARY! MARY! 

clergyman whose forefathers had belonged to 
the gentry. Two years after his father's death 
his mother married a second time; Ben's step- 
father was a master bricklayer, Thomas Ful- 
ler describes the future great man, trowel in 
hand, a book in his pocket, helping in the struc- 
ture of Lincoln's Inn. But he could not long 
endure such an occupation (at which, you 7nay 
be sure, together with his conversion to Roman 
Catholicism, while in durance on account of a 
duel, his later adversaries did not fail to jeer,) 
so he went as a soldier to the Netherlands; 
where, on one occasion, under the eyes of both 
camps, he killed one of the enemy's soldiers in 
single combat. Returning to London, (he was 
a child of the town, as was Shakespeare of the 
country,) he married at the early age of nine- 
teen; — Shakespeare was eighteen when he mar- 
ried Anne Hathaway. Twenty -six years later 
in his conversations with Drummond of Haw- 
thornden, whom he visited while on a walking 
tour through England and Scotland, he de- 
scribed his wife as ' a shrew, yet honest ' . . . 
He had the misfortune to survive his children. — 
For considerably over a century following his 
death, it was considered, by young poets, wits 
and courtiers, just cause for pride to be sealed 
* of the tribe of Ben.* He himself tells us that 
the first speech of Sylla's ghost in the tragedy of 

97 



MARY! MARY! 

Cataline was written after he had parted with 
his friends at the tavern; he ^ had drunk well 
that night and had brave notions/ Not with- 
out humour^ as Dr. Brandes remarks^ using 
Bens favourite word, is the glimpse we catch of 
him in France while travelling as tutor with Sir 
Walter Raleigh's son, — Sir Walter was at the 
time, imprisoned in the Tower awaiting execu- 
tion. It was young Raleigh's pleasure to get his 
venerable companion drunk beyond the powers 
of utterance, and then wheel him in a barrow 
about the streets of Paris, and so exhibit him 
to the astonished and delighted citizens. 

JOHN FLETCHER : 20 years of age, son 
of the queen's chaplain^ the Bishop of London; 
born in Rye in Sussex, where at the time, his 
father was vicar, ' In an age of song, when 
every playwright could on occasion produce a 
lyric or two of remarkable grace and loveliness, 
songs in every style, and always right, always 
beautiful, seemed to flow by nature from Fletch- 
er's pen/ It was due as much to his genius as 
to the blindness of the critics that for almost a 
century after the Restoration he (and his col- 
laborator Beaumont) were the most popular of 
Elizabethen dramatists. 

JOHN LYLY: 46 years of age, university 
graduate, poet and dramatist. The best of his 
work was published before 15^2. He was the 

98 



MARY! MARY! 

author of Euphues or the Anatomy of Wit, 
(1578), the most influential and popular book 
in England before the coming of Marlowe. 
His vogue, however, was rapidly declining, and, 
so far as is known, he died poor and neglected. 
Elizabeth, who professed to admire his work, 
did nothing for him, though he lived for years 
on the hope of becoming master of the revels 
at court. He was married, the father of two 
sons and a daughter. 

MICHAEL DRAYTON : 36 years of age, 
stolid and plodding, already regarded as a pla- 
giarist in 1598, as appears from certain lines 
of Edward Guilpin's in his Skialetheia. The 
influence of Shakespeare is noticeable in the 
IS99 edition of Drayton's Idea; and this 
is of some importance as proving the Sonnets to 
have been written before that date, though they 
were not published until 1609. He was born in 
Hartshull in Warwickshire, and lies buried in 
Westminster Abbey. 

JOHN FLORIO: 47 years of age, a lexi- 
cographer and translator, of Tuscan origin, of 
middle stature, swarthy and strutting. He had 
been a teacher of French and Italian at Oxford 
University. It has been suggested that he was 
satirised by Shakespeare in the character of 
Holofernes, the pompous pedant, in Love's 
Labour's Lost. He is mentioned by Wood, in 

99 



MARYl MARY! 

Athena Oxoniensis, as a very useful man in his 
profession, zealous for his religion, and deeply 
attached to England. His last, and perhaps 
greatest work was a translation of Montaigne's 
Essays, published in folio in i6oj, and dedi- 
cated to the queen. Special interest attaches to 
this work from the circumstance that of the sev- 
eral copies of the first edition in the British 
Museum Library, one bears the autograph of 
Shakespeare and another that of Ben Jonson. — 
The lines I give him to read appeared anony- 
mously about 1600; it is doubtful if he be the 
author of them, but, though he wrote quite flu- 
ently in verse, I could find nothing of his so suit- 
able to my purpose, and, this once, have acted 
arbitrarily. 

WILLIAM KEMP: 28 years of age, a jig 
dancer, '' The Rev. W . A. Harrison called at- 
tention to evidence which brings Mrs. Fitton 
into connection with a member of Shakespeare's 
company, that is, the Lord Chamberlain's com- 
pany, leaving it easily to be inferred that she 
must have been acquainted with the members of 
the company, and especially with such as were 
more prominent. In 1600 William Kemp, the 
clown of the company, dedicated his ' Nine 
Daies Wonder' to * Mistress Anne Fitton, 
Mayde of Honour to most sacred Mayde, Royal 
Queene Elizabeth.* The book gives an ac- 
100 



MARY! MARY! 

count of a journey which Kemp had performed^ 
morris-dancing from London to Norwich. As 
Dyce maintained, when he edited Kemp's hook 
for the Camden Society, Mrs. Fitton's Chris- 
tion name was given erroneously as ' Anne! 
The error may have originated from Kemp not 
being well acquainted with Mistress Fitton's 
Christian name. Perhaps, however, it is more 
probable that he wrote ' Marie,' a name which 
might so be written as to be easily mistaken for 
' Anne! But, however this may be, Elizabeth 
certainly had no maid of honour Anne Fitton in 
i^gg or 1600. It follows that the person in- 
tended by Kemp was Mistress Mary Fitton; and 
a good deal of light is thus thrown on her char- 
acter. That one of the Queen's maids of hon- 
our should be chosen as the patroness of a publi- 
cation of so comparatively frivolous a character 
as this of Kemp's might well seem surprising. 
But facts already adduced make this seem 
much less wonderful." — Thomas Tyler, Shake- 
speare's Sonnets.' — Among the facts already 
adduced might be noted the following: * Mary 
Fitton, maid of honour, had one bastard by 
Wm. E. of Pembroke, &' two bastards by Sir 
Richard Leveson, Kt.' — Kemp from the be- 
ginning played all the chief low-comedy parts in 
Shakespeare's dramas — Peter and Balthasar 
in Romeo and Juliet, Shallow in Henry 
lOl 



MARY! MARY! 

IV, Lancelot in the Merchant of Venice y 
Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, 
Touchstone in As You Like It. He was, per- 
haps the most popular member of the com- 
pany ; but in 1602 he deserted and went over to 
Henslowe. His loss was keenly felt; Shake- 
speare sent the following shaft after him from 
the lips of Hamlet: — 

And let those who play your clowns speak no more 
than is set down for them, for there be of them that 
will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of 
barren spectators to laugh too; though, in the mean- 
time, some necessary question of the play be then to 
be considered: that's villainous, and shows a most piti- 
ful ambition in the fool that uses it. 

His description of the ' Nine Daies Won- 
der,* with its arrogant dedication, shows how 
conceited Kemp must have been; and Hamlet 
shows us how he must have annoyed Shake- 
speare with his * gags ' and interpolations. 
This reproof, however, is couched in quite gen- 
eral terms; certain far sharper criticisms, con- 
tained in the edition of 160J, were expunged 
when the wanderer returned to the company. 

SIR WALTER RALEIGH : 47 years of 

age, the very type of the vigourous versatility 

of the Elizabethan period — soldier, seaman, 

statesman, poet, historian, philosopher, courtier 

102 



MARY! MARY! 

and wit; and always he played his part with con- 
summate art and self-assurance. He discov- 
ered the Guianas, and established the first Brit- 
ish colony in North America, Virginia, named 
by him in compliment to the Queen. He intro- 
duced potatoes into Ireland and tobacco into 
England, — tobacco had, however, been cul- 
tivated for years in Portugal and was known 
in France at the court of Queen Catharine 
de Medici. He fought in the Netherlands, 
in Ireland, in Spain, in Africa, and here 
and there about the seas; it was his advice 
{not to board the Spanish Galleons) that made 
possible Drake's victory over the Armada. 
— And Spenser styled him ' the summer's night- 
ingale.* Yet he was altogether of the world 
worldly; a pirate, an opportunist, almost the 
murderer of his young rival Essex; and, after 
Essex's execution, he was the best hated man in 
England, unpopular with the people, hissed and 
hooted whenever he appeared upon the streets. 
Heroism is simple, homespun, almost selfless; 
Raleigh was ever motivated, acquiring wealth 
or power. I know he pleaded for Udell, but 
there is for me but one great act in his life: when 
he married and forfeited the Queen's favour, 
the Queen who could brook no rival. Raleigh 
had seduced Elizabeth Throckmorton, a maid 
of honour; reckless of consequences, he made 
103 



MARY! MARY! 

her his wife, — andy in consequence, went to the 
Tower for the first time. — His death, the 
speech from the scaffold — he seems almost to 
have atoned for his life, if that were possible. 

WILLIAM HERBERT: ig years of age, 
eldest son of the Earl of Pembroke, and Shake- 
speare's best beloved. Very probably the hand- 
somest and best liked young man in the England 
of his day. 



104 



MARY! MARY! 

November^ ISQQ. . . . The taproom of the 
Mermaid Tavern in Cheapside. Here the 
Syren, a literary club founded by Sir Walter 
Raleigh, held its meetings. 

About seven or seven-thirty in the evening. 

In the back a grilled window through which 
one may see the lights in the houses opposite and 
an occasional party passing with lanterns, or the 
night-watch on his rounds. To the right of the 
window, a door opening onto the street. Be- 
fore the window, a long wooden bench and a 
table running lengthwise with the wall. To 
right and left, other such tables and benches. 
But there is an open space in the centre of the 
room, reserved for the speaker having the 
floor. In the far corner to the left, a door 
leading into the rest of the house. The ceilings 
are raftered and plastered; the walls are pan- 
elled and — 'twas good advice; mine host of the 
Mermaid doubtless followed it — * for thy 
walls, a pretty slight drollery, or the story of 
the prodigal, or the German hunting in water- 
work, is worth a thousand of these bed-hang- 
ings and these fly-bitten tapestries* 
105 



MARY! MARY! 

The door from the street opens, and 
MARY, disguised as a young gentleman of the 
court, enters accompanied by her brother 
EDWARD. 

MARY: [looking curiously about the room'\. 
So this is where they hold their meetings, full 
of fine talk, art and love and war? 

EDWARD: Yes. . . . O' Wednesdays. 

MARY : A strange place. Who would think 
to look for my Will o' the Wisp in a taproom? 

EDWARD: And why not? Think you he is 
always sighing, or wracking his poor brain for 
rhymes? A man must laugh, or turn Papist. 

MARY : He told me he was going to read a 
sonnet here to-night, praising my eyes. 

EDWARD: The first? 

MARY : No, not the first. And yet he would 
not let me see it. The club must pass upon it. 
If they do not like it, then he thinks it unworthy 
of me, and so destroys it. 

EDWARD: He should destroy them all. I 
have no patience with these ballad-mongers, 
littering the world with their rhymes. 

MARY: Hush! for I am all a-tiptoe to hear 
his verses read, almost mad with waiting. 

EDWARD: Say rather, mad to come on such 
an errand. If you were seen, the Queen — 

MARY: [putting her hand over his mouth'], 
io6 



MARY! MARY! 

Hush! there's no danger. But, oh, I'm glad 
you're with me. 

EDWARD: Certes, for you could not venture 
out alone, in such a guise. 

MARY: Pray, your reason, sir? I would 
have come alone — at least, I think I would 
have. You never heard him read his verses. 

EDWARD: Nor do I care to. I prefer 
Chapman or Henslowe's comedies. 

MARY: Blasphemous Ned! And I — (ah 
me!) I have so longed to watch him when he 
did not know that I was nigh, when he was just 
himself and not the lover, not the poet, not the 
actor, just plain Will Shakespeare of Stratford 
Town. 

EDWARD : Is he ever anything else ? 

MARY: His heart is always prostrate, 
kneeling to me : — 

In the old age black was not counted fair, 
Or if it were, it bore not beauty's name ; 
But now is black beauty's successive heir. 

EDWARD : I had as leave hear a dog bay the 
moon. 

MARY: And yet you steal his verses. I 
have noticed, when he thought me busy with 
other things and unconscious of his presence, 
how he gazed upon me with an awed wonder in 
his eyes. Heigh-ho, its different when a poet 
107 



MARY! MARY! 

loves; he woos with such a myriad of gorgeous 
words; he lifts the ordinary passions — and I 
suppose they are ordinary — out of the com- 
monplace and gives to every phrase a new 
significance. The sun, the moon, the stars — 
' Diana's waiting women ' — grown familiar 
with the years, appear to put on a new dress and 
trip across the heavens like fairies in a masque. 

EDWARD : None can usurp his place ? 

MARY: Not to-day, not to-morrow. 

EDWARD: Why, then, do you coquette so 
wantonly ? 

MARY: Michievous me I He is so quaint 
when he is jealous. 

EDWARD: His love vies with his patience. 
What if your madness wearied him? 

MARY : Not to-day — Listen : — 

Tell me thou lov'st elsewhere; but In my sight, 
Dear heart, forbear to glance thine eyes aside : 
What need'st thou wound with cunning, when thy 

might 
Is more than my o'er-press'd defence can bide? 

[She has slid into a place at the table, way for- 
ward on the left.] Call the drawer, Ned; I 
would some cherry wine. 

EDWARD [calling] : Francis I 
FRANCIS [within] : Anon, sir, anon. 
EDWARD: Come hither, sirrah. 
io8 



MARY! MARY! 

\_Enter Francis^ 

FRANCIS: Coming, sir. You are welcome, 
sir. 

EDWARD [seating himself on the bench be- 
side Maryl : The young gentleman here de- 
sires a glass of cherry-wine; and for myself a 
cup of canary with sugar in It. 

FRANCIS: Aye, sir. On the instant, sir. 
[He starts awayl : 

MARY [recalling him'] : Francis, knowest 
thou one Will Shakespeare? 

FRANCIS: Aye, sir; that I do, sir. 
MARY: He wears my Lord Chamberlain's 
livery ? 

FRANCIS : Aye, sir. 

MARY: I prithee, of what humour Is he? 
FRANCIS: Of a very pleasant humour, an* 
it please you, sir. 

MARY: Hast known him long? 

[Their dialogue is interrupted by the en- 
trance from the street of CHETTLE, Shake- 
speare, JONSON, FLETCHER, LYLY, DRAY- 
TON, FLORIO, KEMP, and several others, 
poets and players. They are all chatting 
and laughing, jostling each other in high 
spirits.] 
FRANCIS: Let me see; about Michaelmas 
next It will be — 

109 



MARY! MARY! 

SHAKESPEARE [to chettle] : And his elo- 
quence be other than ' Anon, sir,' — 

FRANCIS [continuing, to MARY and edward] : 
In sooth, sir, as I reckon it, twelve years. 

SHAKESPEARE [continuing] : Or ' as true 
as day,' or ' as God shall mend me,' and such 
like parrot phrases, may'st thou be strung up 
by the heels like a Yorkshire boar at the butch- 
er's. 

CHETTLE: God a' mercy! so should I be 
hanged indeed. 

JONSON: No man can escape his fate. 
CHETTLE: An' I be not better than the 
best of you, I am as withered as a dried 
prune. 

MARY [to FRANCIS] : Is that not Will 
Shakespeare there with the fat old man? 

[CHETTLE has seated himself at a table in 
the centre of the room, with Shakespeare 
on his left and jonson on his right. The 
others take places here and there at the 
other tables. FRANCIS turns and examines 
the new arrivals.'] 
'CHETTLE : Francis ! 
FRANCIS: Anon, sir. 

MARY: My question, Francis. Can'st not 
answer? Do'st not know him? 
FRANCIS : As I live, sir. 
CHETTLE [in a voice of thunder] : Fran- 
IIO 



MARY! MARY! 

CIS, you fleshless monstrosity, you fiddle-bow, 
you starvelling logger-head, you — 

FRANCIS : Anon, sir. 

CHETTLE: Oh, for breath to speak in just 
comparisons ! 

FRANCIS: Anon, sir; coming, sir. [He 
goes towards chettle's table. ^ 

SHAKESPEARE [/O FRANCIS] : So ? I had 

thought to hear thee answer, ' Score three pints 
of bastard and brew a pottle of ale, simple of 
itself.' 

CHETTLE : As I live by my wits, rare words, 
a brave world! 

FRANCIS: Anon, sir. 

CHETTLE: I'll be sworn I make as good use 
of liquor as many a man doth of a prayer book; 
but I'll no hen fruit in my brewage, nor lime 
either. 

EDWARD : Francis. 

CHETTLE: Away, you rogue. Look to the 
guests. 

FRANCIS l^over his shoulder as he hurries 
out~\ : Anon, sir. 

CHETTLE : That ever this fellow should be 
so well-languaged and yet an under-skinker in 
Cheapside, passeth my comprehension. 

JONSON : He is as witty as a serving man in 
Menander. 

CHETTLE: And as valiant as Errcles, or 
III 



MARY! MARY! 

rm a comfit-maker's wife. [The door opens; 
and RALEIGH and Herbert enter from the 
street.^ 

CHETTLE [to SHAKESPEARE] : Here comes 
Sir Walter and your young friend, Herbert. 

MARY [to her brother^ : Who is that beau- 
tiful young man ? 

EDWARD: The Earl of Pembroke's son; 
handsome young devil. 

MARY [to herself] : Oh, I'm so glad I 
came. 

SHAKESPEARE [rising and motioning HERB- 
ERT to a place beside him]. Welcome, friend. 
Sir Walter, your servant. [ The company rises, 
while the newcomers seat themselves.] 

RALEIGH [barely nodding his head] : 
Friends. 

HERBERT [with a wave of the hand] : Gen- 
tlemen. 

ALL: Your servants. 

[The company resume their former places. 
FRANCIS and his assistants move here and 
there serving ale, honey-drink, apple-drink, 
and various kinds of wine. Never before 
or since has England enjoyed so many dif- 
ferent kinds of beverages; there were 
fifty-six varieties of French wine in use and 
thirty-six of Spanish and Italian, to say 
nothing of the many home-made, and all 

112 



MARY! MARY! 

sorts of strong and small beer. RALEIGH 
JONSON, CHETTLE, FLORIO and EDWARD 

FITTON smoke.'] 

CHETTLE [above the buzz of talk] : By the 
Lord, lads, shall we to business? 

CHORUS OF VOICES: Aye, marry. Order! 
Order! 

RALEIGH : Concerning Marlowe, was it not ? 

DRAYTON: You mistake, sir; we were to 
bring verses of our own and read them here. 

LYLY: Such as might vie with Marlowe's 
lines to Helen, not in expression only, but in 
conception, not in metre, but in beauty. 

CHETTLE : 'Tis impossible. 

SHAKESPEARE : What ! so swift to appraise 
that of which thou art still in ignorance? 

CHETTLE: 'Tis impossible. Dost thou 
hear me, Will? When any man surpasses this 
same Kit Marlowe, may a cup of sack be my 
poison. 

SHAKESPEARE: How now, my sweet crea- 
ture of bombast, sayest thou I cannot? 

CHETTLE: I say, thou canst not? I'll see 
thee damned ere I say thou canst not. 

SHAKESPEARE: Marry, then? 

CHETTLE: But an thou dost, I am a brew- 
er's horse or a Jew, an Ebrew Jew. 

DRAYTON [to chettle] : You were to read 
Marlowe's lines, Hal. 

113 



MARY! MARYl 

CHETTLE : I cannot. 

LYLY: Your reason, sir? We who have 
our own verses cannot read his. 

CHETTLE: Then must Francis read them, 
for what with halloing and roaring of answers 
In church, I have no more voice than a spar- 
row. 

SHAKESPEARE: Thou hast not seen the In- 
side of a church since thy namesake was king. 

CHETTLE: Hal? 'Tis a royal name. 

JONSON : Of late fallen Into disuse. 

CHETTLE : Yet was I as virtuously given as 
a man need be; drank little and gave such sar- 
canet surety for my oaths as might a Sunday- 
citizen. 

SHAKESPEARE: Not wlthln the memory of 
any here present. 

CHETTLE: Do thou amend thy plays, and 
I'll amend my life. 

HERBERT [who has been watching MARY] : 
Let the young gentleman yonder read Mar- 
lowe's lines and I'll warrant you none shall sur- 
pass their beauty. 

CHETTLE [observing MARY, who is somewhat 
taken aback by being thus suddenly drawn into 
their discussion^ : He hath just such a fire In 
his eye as burned In Kit's. By the Lord, I 
could have believed him his younger brother. 
Come lad; you shall honour us. 
114 



MARY! MARY! 

MARY : I fear I am untutored In these mat- 
ters. 

CHETTLE: Matters or no matters, it mat- 
ters not. I will not be gainsaid. 

HERBERT \_rising, taking a manuscript copy 
of the ever famous lines, and going over and 
putting it into mary's hand] : Have no fear. 

MARY: Only reluctance to mar with faulty 
elocution the faultless rythm of another's verse. 

HERBERT [leading her gently into the open 
space before chettle's table'] : The lines are 
beautiful; had I not fixed my eyes upon your 
face and heard the music of your voice, I might 
have said no man could add to their great store 
of loveliness, but now — Have no fear. 

MARY: You are over-kind. 

HERBERT [bowing] : I am your servant, sir. 
\_He goes back to his place at the table.] 

CHETTLE: Silence, boys; gallants all, si- 
lence. \_To mary]. Come, lad, come. 

MARY \_first looking helplessly about the 
roofn, takes up the manuscript and reads] : 

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, 
And burned the topless towers of Ilium? — 
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss I — 
Her lips suck forth my soul ; see where it flies ! — 
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again. 
Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips, 
And all is dross that is not Helena. 



MARY! MARY! 

I will be Paris, and for love of thee, 
Instead of Troy, shall Wittenberg be sacked, 
And I will combat with weak Menelaus, 
And wear thy colours on my plumed crest; 
Yes, I will wound Achilles in the heel, 
And then return to Helen for a kiss. 
Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air 
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars ; 
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter 
When he appeared to hapless Semele ; 
More lovely than the monarch of the sky 
In wanton Arethusa's azured arms; 
And none but thou shall be my paramour ! 

[The manuscript slides from her hands to 
the floor.'] 
CHETTLE: Bravo I bravo! [General ap- 
plause; cries of *' Well read."'] 
CHETTLE: Excellent well read. 

[mary hesitates a moment, and then runs 

back, blushing the least bit, to her place 

beside her brother.] 

HERBERT [rising] : Sir, and I were a maid 

and wooed with such words in such a voice, I 

would yield me immediate to your embrace. 

SHAKESPEARE [to mary] : Sir, and you 
were a maid, I well might sue in some such 
words for such another kiss as Helen's from 
your lips. 

MARY: I fear you flatter me. 

ii6 



MARY! MARY! 

HERBERT: No, on my honour, I speak 
truth. 

CHETTLE : 'Twas excellent well read. 

LYLY: Balanced sentence for sentence, as 
harmonious as the plash of waves along the 
beach. 

CHETTLE: How now, you rhymers, can do 
as well? 

DRAYTON : Art Improves with age ; year by 
year we learn more from the ancients and 
from nature, and in our larger knowledge 
of life may well improve upon their handi- 
work. 

CHETTLE: No, byV Lady, no. There has 
but one lover lived in our time; improve upon 
the ancients if you will. 

JONSON : Say rather if you can. 

CHETTLE : I care not. But this same Mar- 
lowe — I defy you. A rogue and a villain, but 
a most sweet spoken youth, who could concoct 
you a proper lament upon a faithless mistress 
as lightly as he had within the hour debauched 
her. 

DRAYTON: For my part, I care not for 
such adventurers. 

FLORIO: Nor I. Love should be civilised, 
not barbarous. 

CHETTLE: Adventurers, say you? I defy 
adventurers! A plague on such damnable ex- 
117 



MARY! MARY! 

pressions. 'Twas a most excellent good word 
before it became ill-sorted, now is it as odious 
as the word ' occupy.' Are we not all ad- 
venturers, voyaging hither and thither, we know 
not where, about the seas of life in rotten leaky 
old tubs? 

SHAKESPEARE: Not angry, Hal? 

CHETTLE: If his conceit were not as thick 
as Tewksbury mustard, he had not used such 
a word. I would rather than forty capons, 
Kit were here to answer him. A plague on all 
cowards! Is there no virtue extant? 

SHAKESPEARE: Come, you pitiful-hearted 
Titan, what's this you mutter? 

CHETTLE : It goes hard against my stom- 
ach that one who has not so much as clapped 
eye upon this same Kit of Canterbury — God 
rest his soul I — should speak of him as I might 
of Bob Greene. 

JONSON: Not that my judgment is of 
years — 

CHETTLE [interrupting] : My liver cries 
out against all blasphemers of true worth. 
[To a drawer]. Boy, a cup of sack. 

JONSON [soberly, Shakespeare produced 
his first play after it had been refused by HENS- 
LOWe] : And yet, methinks, our Will here 
doth far outshine Greene or Kyd or Marlowe's 
mighty line. 

ii8 



MARY! MARY! 

CHETTLE \^grudgingly ; he loves WILL SHAKE- 
SPEARE as FALSTAFF loved the prince] : And 
any could, 'twould be this same mad mounte- 
bank Will ; a plague on him. 

SHAKESPEARE: What, woulds't revile me? 

CHETTLE: Aye, and to thy face. I speak 
ill of no man behind his back. 

SHAKESPEARE: Thou hast grown so fat- 
witted with drinking old sack and unbuttoning 
thee after supper, that thou hast forgotten what 
is due the present company. How canst thou 
exalt one above the rest? 

CHETTLE: Indeed thou comest near me 
now, Will ; I am overgiven to praising my fel- 
lows. 

SHAKESPEARE: What a devil hast thou to 
do with the paying of compliments? 

CHETTLE: By'r Lady, not so much as my 
hostess of the tavern when she has borne and 
borne, and been fubbed off from this day to that 
until those of thy complexion have become in- 
finities upon her score. 

SHAKESPEARE: Did I ever call for thee to 
pay? 

CHETTLE: No, I'll give thee thy due there. 

SHAKESPEARE: Then peace, woolsack, and 
listen to the poets. 

CHETTLE: Aye, marry, I will. I must 
make some show of penance, while I have the 
119 



MARY! MARY! 

strength left. It may be too late when thou 
hast — 

SHAKESPEARE: A truce, Hal. 

JONSON: And listen to Drayton. 

chettle: Aye, St. Michael. [To dray- 
ton.] We wait on you, sir. 

DRAYTON : Am I the first ? 

JONSON : Always. 

DRAYTON [coming forward to a place before 
CHETTLe's tahle^ : As you will. [He reads.] 

How many paltry, foolish, painted things, 
That now in coaches trouble every street, 
Shall be forgotten, whom no poet sings. 
Ere they be well wrapped in their winding-sheet; 
Where I to thee eternity shall give. 
When nothing else remaineth of these days, 
And queens hereafter shall be glad to live 
Upon the alms of my superfluous praise ; 
Virgins and matrons reading these my rhymes, 
Shall be so much delighted with thy story. 
That they shall grieve they lived not in these times, 
To have seen thee, their sex's only glory; 
So shalt thou fly above the vulgar throng, 
Still to survive in my immortal song. 

[General applause, cries of bravo, etc. 
DRAYTON bows and goes back to his seat.'] 
CHETTLE [to SHAKESPEARE] : By the Lord, 
'tis himself he praises, not the lady. 
RALEIGH : Tis the way with poets. 
1 20 



MARY! MARY! 

JONSON : With all men, sir. 

HERBERT: Certainly with those at court. 

SHAKESPEARE: And why not? Helen her- 
self was inarticulate; she shares blind Homer's 
immortality as in a portrait the sitter wears a 
ring and both are painted on the canvas. 
When the ring is lost, the sitter dust, the por- 
trait still remains to tell of both of them; and 
so a song endures singing forever of Phyllida 
and Corydon who wooed her with his melodies. 
And yet I sometimes think that you and I will 
be forgotten with all the other singers who are 
mute in hushed oblivion. What profit to say 
your love was fair? Was ever love other than 
fair? What can you add to Marlowe's verse? 
Better, methinks, to say She was not lovelier 
than Helen; no armies fought long battles for 
her sake, and yet I who knew her well loved 
her — she was not fair but amoureuse. 

MARY [to her brother^ : Is he not ^ am- 
oureux? ' 

EDWARD: To me, words; what of it? He 
is a word-monger. 

MARY: A lord of language. 

RALEIGH: Shall we hear Lyly? 

CHETTLE: Aye, marry. You, John, come 
forth. 

LYLY [reciting his verses as he comes for- 
ward from his seat'] : 

121 



MARY! MARY! 

Cupid and my Campaspe played 

At cards for kisses : Cupid paid. 

He stakes his quiver, bows and arrows, 

His mother's doves and team of sparrows; 

Loses them too ; then down he throws 

The coral of his lips, the rose 

Growing on's cheek, but none knows how; 

With these the crystal of his brow, 

And then the dimple of his chin — 

All these did my Campaspe win. 

And last he set her both his eyes. — 

She won and blind did Cupid rise. — 

O Love, has she done this to thee? 

What shall, alas, become of me? 

[General applause; LYLY bows low and re- 
tires to his seat.~\ 

CHETTLE [to FLETCHER] : And you, Jack? 

FLETCHER: Could not love one who so 
maltreats the god of love. 

CHETTLE: How now, lad? 

FLETCHER: Talk not to me of mistresses; 
her tongue was ever telling lie after He. Never 
again shall love, deluding love, find dwelling in 
my heart. That place that does contain my 
books, the best companions, Is to me a glorious 
court, where hourly I may converse with the 
old sages and philosophers. There let me 
rest. Why I could sleep while all the maids 
in London cried : * For pity, stay with us and 

122 



MARY! MARY! 

dally in the shade. See, lusty Spring is here, 
yellow and gaudy blue, daintily blushing, en- 
ticing men to joy in amourous sport and 
play about the meade.' Away with such de- 
lights ! 

chettle: By the Lord, thou sayest true, 
lad; but was not Joan in Sussex a most sweet 
wench ? 

FLETCHER; What a pox have I to do with 
Joan in Sussex? See here, last night I wrote 
in praise of melancholy. 

CHETTLE: Sweet wag, and not yet a hair 
upon thy chin. 

FLETCHER : I have a beard coming. 

CHETTLE: With the new year. [To the 
company at large^ : But shall he read his 
verses? 

CHORUS OF VOICES: Aye, marry, let him 
read them. 

CHETTLE: Like a lass that mimics her fa- 
ther's deep-voiced chidings. Come then, 
prithee, Jacques, read. I am in a mood to hear 
your rhymes. I feel myself as melancholy as 
a lover's lute or the drone of a Lincolnshire 
bagpipe. 

FLETCHER {^reads'] : 

Hence, all you vain delights, 
As short as are the nights 

123 



MARY! MARY! 

Wherein you spend your folly; 

There's naught in this life sweet, 

If man were wise to see't, 
But only melancholy! 
Welcome, folded arms and fixed eyes, 
A sigh that piercing mortifies, 
A look that's fastened to the ground, 
A tongue chained up, without a sound! 
Fountain-heads and pathless groves. 
Places which pale passion loves ! 
Moonlight walks, when all the fowls 
Are warmly housed, save bats and owls ! 

A midnight bell, a parting groan ! 

These are the sounds we feed upon ; 
Then stretch our bones in a still gloomy valley ; 
Nothing's so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy. 

JONSON: O woe! O woe is me! Keep 
time, O plashing fountain, with my tears; lan- 
guish unsolaced in a desert Arcady; grief falls 
in showers about my ears like melting snow 
upon some craggy hill. 

MARY [aside to her brother~\ : I find his 
verses very pretty. 

HERBERT [to FLETCHER]: Exquisite; my 
compliments, sir. 

CHETTLE: A truce to weeping. 'Tis no 
more in keeping with our design than crepe at 
a butcher's. Commend the lad; he bath done 
nobly. 

124 



MARY! MARY! 

CHORUS OF VOICES : Nobly ! excellently well, 
etc. 

SHAKESPEARE [quoting himself] : 

And so, sigh no mo', 
But be you blithe and bonny, 
Converting all your sounds of woe 
Into Hey nonny, nonny. 

CHETTLE: Let US be merry. [To the 
drawer.] A cup of sack, boy. 

jonson: And another. 

CHETTLE: Who now? You, Florio ; come, 
a truce to tears. 

FLORIO [reads] : 

My love in her attire doth show her wit. 

It doth so well become her; 

For every season she hath dressings fit, 

For winter, spring, and summer. 

No beauty she doth miss 

When all her robes are on ; 

But Beauty's self she is 

When all her robes are gone. 

[General applause. Cries of '' Well 
said/* etc.] 
JONSON: And hast thou seen her so, John? 
Fie, for shame. 

SHAKESPEARE: Nay, but are there any here 
can swear he speaks the truth? 

125 



MARY! MARY! 

CHETTLE: Marry, and there be not, Vis a 
most properly villainous company, and Fd as 
leave consort with babes unwitting of the world 
as drink with e'er a one of you. 

SHAKESPEARE: Prithee, most noble Fans, 
upon what hlU-top has she appeared to you for 
judgment of her charms ? An' you judge of our 
verses as lightly as of our vices, we are all con- 
demned for Puritans and had as leave sing 
psalms as praise of Amorette. 

CHETTLE: Then read; thou art not above 
suspicion. 

SHAKESPEARE: Was Caesar's wife? 

CHETTLE [confidentially] : I have heard 
say she was most lewdly given. 

JONSON: An' you heard that, 'twas not of 
Calpurnia. 

CHETTLE : Had he more than one wife? 

JONSON: Aye, marry, four. 

SHAKESPEARE : And as many loves as thou 
hast fondly dreamed of in the night. 

CHETTLE: Then was he indeed favoured 
among men. A plague of sighing and grief! 
I have pursued women since my birth, and been 
successful not above a score of times. 

SHAKESPEARE: Why hast thou never mar- 
ried? 

CHETTLE : What, with such friends as I am 
cursed withal? Then had you been the spoil 
126 



MARY! MARY! 

of me. No, I will be procurer for ne'er a man 
in Christendom, not I. Read your verses. 

SHAKESPEARE: I cannot; I have destroyed 
them. 

CHETTLE: What? Jest not with me. An' 
you do — 

SHAKESPEARE [interrupting'] : I would not 
jest, Hal, when thou art serious. 

CHETTLE: Then prithee, read. 

SHAKESPEARE: How Can I read? These 
others have stolen all my metaphors, pillaged 
the heavens for similes, ransacked the earth for 
secret beauties such as might bear comparison 
with the fair ladies of their love; lured fairy 
phrases from out the mass of commonplace that 
litters this old world, and made the oldest fables 
point a new moral, all, all, in service of Dan 
Cupid. And yet you bid me read. My verses 
could be at best but a poor repetition of all that 
they have said. No I'll not read. My mis- 
tress is too fair for plagiarlstic praise. What 
others say of Beatrice, Heloise and Annabelle 
could never pass for laud of her. 

JONSON: Then you will not read? 'Tis 
well. We have others of your rhymings here. 
They shall be entered for the prize. 

SHAKESPEARE: No, I pray you. I will 
write more. [He gets up and goes toward a 
table in the rear of the room near the door.'\ 
127 



MARY! MARYl 

CHETTLE: Marry do; and it be not better 
than the best of Ovid — 

SHAKESPEARE {^interrupting^ : Hast read 
Ovid, Hal? O learned Judge! 

CHETTLE: Zounds; an' you trifle with 
me — 

SHAKESPEARE \_again interrupting'] : O up- 
right Judge ! 

JONSON : Peace, Will ; you anger him. 

SHAKESPEARE: No abuse, Hal. 

CHETTLE : What ! no abuse to taunt me with 
catch phrases from thy most vile smelling thea- 
tre? 

SHAKESPEARE: Hal, o' my honour, no 
abuse. 

CHETTLE: A plague on all plagiarists! A 
man that would parody himself — 

HERBERT: I prithee peace. 

CHETTLE: He hath not so much grace as 
would serve to be prologue to a dish of tripe. 

SHAKESPEARE : O noble Judge ! 

JONSON: Peace, Will. 

[SHAKESPEARE calls for pen and paper.] 

CHETTLE: There lives not above four good 
men unhanged in England, God help the while, 
[/w a voice of thunder.] Boy, bring me a cup 
of sack! 

SHAKESPEARE: Not angry, Hal? 
128 



MARY! MARY! 

CHETTLE: That's past praying for. 
JONSON: Cease, Will. 
CHETTLE: Come, Ben, cheerily. Let's 
have it. 

[SHAKESPEARE sets to writing.] 

JONSON [reading] : 

Have you seen but a bright lily grow 
Before rude hands have touched it? 
Have you marked but the fall o' the snow 
Before the soil hath smutched it? 
Have you felt the wool of the beaver, 

Or the swan's down ever? 
Or have smelt o' the bud o' the brier? 

Or the nard in the fire? 
Or have tasted the bag of the bee? 
O so white ! O so soft ! O so sweet is she. 

SHAKESPEARE: Good, Master Ben; It 
makes music on which a myriad loves might 
feed. 

HERBERT: O rare Ben Jonson! 

CHETTLE : By the Lord I had not done bet- 
ter myself. 

CHORUS: Honest Ben! well said! etc. 

MARY [to her brother] : 'Twas very pretty, 
but my Sweet William — We have but to 
wait. 

CHETTLE: And now, Sir Walter. 
129 



MARY! MARY! 

RALEIGH: 'TIs but a trifle. 

JONSON: And like gold outweighs a mass 
of dross. 

RALEIGH : My love admits no rival, and so 
perforce I have no love. 

HERBERT: No love, sir? 

RALEIGH : At present none. 

MARY [as though to herself] : 'Tis past be- 
lieving. 

RALEIGH [continuing'] : Save her most gra- 
cious Majesty, the Queen. 

CHETTLE [rising and proffering a toast] : 
The Queen I 

ALL [rising and lifting their cups] : The 
Queen, God bless her ! 

MARY [as the company resume their seats, 
aside to her brother] : And he cares no more 
for her than I do. 

RALEIGH : I could not read verses in praise 
of her; how should she vie here with these oth- 
ers — Diana who so far outshines all women 
yet created. 

MARY [the cat, to her brother] : And she is 
as ugly as the witch of Endor. 

RALEIGH: But I have heard your other 
poets sing, and so — 

JONSON: Let us hear what you have to 
say to them, sir. 

RALEIGH [reading] : 

130 



MARY! MARY! 

Shall I like a hermit dwell, 
On a rock, or in a cell 
Calling home the smallest part 
That is missing of my heart, 
To bestow it where I may 
Meet a rival every day? 
If she undervalue me. 
What care I how fair she be? 

MARY [as though to herself] : If he under- 
value me, what care I how rich he be? 

RALEIGH [overhearing her] : Sir, you 
spoke ? 

MARY [confused] : Your pardon; I was re- 
peating to myself a snatch of song heard long 
ago. Your pardon. 

RALEIGH [with a slight bow to her con- 
tinues] : 

Were her hands as rich a prize 
As her hairs, or precious eyes. 
If she lay them out to take 
Kisses, for good manners' sake; 
And let every lover skip 
From her hand unto her lip; 
If she seem not chaste to me. 
What care I how chaste she be. 

MARY [aside to her brother] : If she let 
him know of the others, I have no pity for 
her. 



131 



MARY! MARY! 

RALEIGH : 

No, she must be perfect snow, 
In effect as well as show ; 
Warming, but as snowballs do, 
Not like fire, by burning too; 
But when she by change hath got 
To her heart a second lot. 
Then if others share with me. 
Farewell her, whate'er she be ! 

CHETTLE : Excellent. 

SHAKESPEARE: Very bravely said. 

CHORUS: So say I; Bravo, etc. 

CHETTLE: I could bid a thousand loves 
good-bye, an^ I thought I should find another 
on the morrow. 

SHAKESPEARE: A very Solomon for wis- 
dom, and for women. Fie, Hal, for shame. 
You are like a candle the better part burnt out. 

CHETTLE: I am like a lamp replenished 
with oil. Come, boy, a cup of sack. My voice 
is as good as any in London. 

JONSON: And yet you cannot read Mar- 
lowe. 

CHETTLE: I can swear an oath with ere a 
man living; an' I do not, I am a shotten her- 
ring. Loving is but so much blasphemy, vows 
plighted and broken with a twist of the tongue. 
Tell me not of love. 

132 



MARY! MARY! 

SHAKESPEARE: No man shall so presump- 
tuous be. 

CHETTLE : Let me hear your verses. 

MARY: Aye, let us hear Will Shakespeare. 

SHAKESPEARE [rising and bowing to mary] : 
Your servant, gentle stranger. 

CHETTLE: A truce for your fine manners; 
they are not In keeping with your plays. 

SHAKESPEARE : How SO ? 

CHETTLE: For you have peopled the stage 
with the greatest number of rogues and villains, 
cutthroats and thiefs, harlots, drunkards and 
cowards in history. Are these fine man- 
ners? 

SHAKESPEARE : Are yours ? 

CHETTLE : And they be not, he was a fool 
that taught them to me. 

SHAKESPEARE [coming forward^ : Speak 
not ill of the dead. 

CHETTLE: There are as many blackguards 
dead as living. 

SHAKESPEARE: Let them rest in peace. If 
their judges here were all as virtuous as thou 
art, it went hard with them in life: they have 
suffered enough. 

CHETTLE : Thou hast a most damnable wit, 
and could Indeed corrupt a saint. Thou hast 
done me much harm, Will, God forgive thee for 
It. 

133 



MARY! MARY! 

SHAKESPEARE : And thou wast not damned 
ere I met thee, 'twas through some oversight. 

CHETTLE: I knew nothing; and now, if a 
man speaks truly, am I little better than one of 
the wicked. I must give over this life. 

SHAKESPEARE : 'Tis near thy time. There 
is not a white hair on thy face but should have 
its effect upon thy character. 

CHETTLE : And, by the Lord, I will give it 
over. 

SHAKESPEARE : Do. 

CHETTLE : I would I werc a weaver ; I could 
sing hymns or anything. 

SHAKESPEARE : I sec a good amendment of 
life in thee, Hal. 

CHETTLE : I would to God I knew where a 
commodity of good names were to be bought. 

SHAKESPEARE: What hast thou to offer in 
exchange? 

CHETTLE: An' I do not get one, thou hast 
been there before me and stolen the lot. But, 
prithee, read: I would steep myself in fantasy. 

SHAKESPEARE: Hast thou no music In thy 
soul? 

CHETTLE: Marry, thou knowest; yet it 
grows stale with repetition. Refresh me with 
thy wood notes wild. 

SHAKESPEARE: What wouldst thou, Hal? 

CHETTLE : Marry, nothing. I like thy f an- 
134 



MARY! MARY! 

cies ; they ascend me into the brain, drive out all 
the foolish and dull vapours which environ it, 
and fill my heart with nimble and delectable 
shapes. Woo me with thy verses. 

MARY [to her brother~\ : Oh listen. I could 
almost swoon to the delicious music of his voice. 

EDWARD [to MARY; he begins to weary of all 
poetry and of all lovers'] : Will you too grow 
lyrical? 

SHAKESPEARE [to chettle] : Art listening, 
Hal? 

CHETTLE: As intent as a cat at a rat hole. 

MARY [to EDWARD]: Hush ! When he 
speaks my praise, I am in love — [She does 
not finish her sentence,] 

SHAKESPEARE [reading] : 

My mistress* eyes are nothing like the sun, — 

CHETTLE [interrupting]: How so? 
SHAKESPEARE [to chettle] : They are 
black. [He resumes his reading.] 

Coral is far more red than her lips red ; 

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun ; 

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. 

MARY [it is scarce the sort of sonnet she had 
expected from her lover to herself] : Can it 
be that I hear aright? 

^3S 



MARY! MARY! 

SHAKESPEARE [reading] : 

I have seen roses damask'd, red and white, 
But no such roses see I in her cheeks ; — 

MARY [bitterly disappointed, to herself] : 
For shame, so to abuse me. 

SHAKESPEARE [reading; he little guesses the 
effect of his verses on the lady to whom they are 
indirectly addressed] : 

And in some perfumes is there more delight 
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. 

MARY [she is still young; never before has 
she been so hurt; as though to herself] : So 
to abuse me before the world. 

SHAKESPEARE [as above — for love is blind, 
and, it may be, the least hit deaf] : 

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know 
That music hath a far more pleasing sound. 

MARY [to herself; sick at heart] : Unkind, 
and I believed in your love. 

SHAKESPEARE [as above, unconscious of the 
pain he is causing] : 

I grant I never saw a goddess go ; 

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground. 

MARY [unable longer to control her rage, 
and disappointment] : Call you such slander 

136 



MARY! MARY! 

praise ? Fie ! For shame so to mock your 
lady here in the presence of your friends. 

CHETTLE: What's this? [^Mary has been 
nursing her wrath unobserved, all eyes being 
centred on Shakespeare. '\ 

SEVERAL \^together^ : Silence. Peace. Let 
Will Shakespeare — 

SHAKESPEARE [apparently unaffected by the 
interruption^ : 

And yet, by Heaven, I think my love as rare 
As any she belied with false compare. 

MARY : T)ut upon you I A late atonement 
for such abuse. 

SHAKESPEARE: On my honour, no abuse, 
and no atonement. My sonnet stands as it is 
written. 'Tis simple truth. 'My mistress' 
eyes are nothing like the sun.' 

MARY [scornfully] : Will your lady think 
as you do ? 

SHAKESPEARE: Perhaps; perhaps she will 
be angry as you are angry; perhaps she will un- 
derstand. 

MARY: Were they not all cowards here 
some champion of your mistress would spring 
forward to defend her good name. 

SHAKESPEARE: Her good name has not 
been questioned. 

HERBERT [to mary] : And why should she 

137 



MARY! MARY! 

need another champion? You are valiant 
enough In all conscience, sir. 

MARY: I win not hear the sex from which 
my mother stems — 

SHAKESPEARE [interrupting'] : Is not every 
word I have said true? 

MARY: True or false, you shall defend 
them. 

[She darts from her place behind the 
table, drawing her sword and making at 
SHAKESPEARE who Stands his ground. HER- 
BERT interposes himself between them."] 
MARY [to HERBERT] : Out of my way. I 
will slit his throat for him, libellous poetaster. 

HERBERT [seizing her in his arms] : Who 
is abusive now? 

MARY [to SHAKESPEARE, Stamping her foot 
in vexation] : I hate you! 

SHAKESPEARE [affecting surprise] : And 
why pray? 

MARY [almost in tears, helpless in Herbert's 
arms, removes her hat and hurls it in Shake- 
speare's face] : I hate you. [Her heavy 
raven-black hair comes loose and falls in a huge, 
glistening, moulten mass about her shoulders.] 
SHAKESPEARE [in amazement, falling back 
against chettle's table]: Mary! Mary! 

HERBERT: By Heavens ! A woman. [He 
holds her even closer.] 

138 



MARY! MARY! 

MARY [to SHAKESPEARE] : You think you 
know me well enough to body forth in verses, 
yet fail to recognise me though we sit above two 
hours together in the same room. You love to 
hear your mistress speak? Well, you shall 
hear her now. 

CHETTLE [a good judge of winel : A fiery 
minx, by all that's holy. 

FLETCHER [disgusted with the whole sex'\ : 
A woman, so to disguise herself and spy upon a 
man. 

HERBERT [as though to himself] : Mistress 
Fitton. 

MARY [bursting into tears, and stamping her 
foot in baffled rage]: I hate you! I hate 
you! 

HERBERT: Mary! Mary! Fie, for shame. 
[He puts his arm more gently about her; sob- 
bing, she hides her face upon his shoulder.] 

JONSON [married, and, as he himself tells 
us, to a shrew] : Sic transit gloria amoris, my 
friends. 

FLETCHER [very young and knowing] : 
Talk not to me of mistresses ! 

SHAKESPEARE [to chettle] : O'my hoH- 
our, Hal, I meant no abuse. 

CHETTLE: Abuse, sayest thou? 'Twas a 
sonnet as lightly caressing as the chill of De- 
cember. 

139 



MARY! MARY! 

MARY [to HERBERT] : Take me away. 
Please, please, take my away. 

HERBERT [courteously^ : Where you will. 
[He leads her towards the door.'] 

CHETTLE [gruffly; anxious to clear the room; 
SHAKESPEARE must be ulone with his grief] ; 
'Tis late, lads. 

RALEIGH: I must to court. 

[He follows MARY and HERBERT out onto 
the street. The company breaks up. As the 
door closes behind the last of them, leaving 
CHETTLE and SHAKESPEARE alone in the tap- 
room, FRANCIS enters with a cup of ale; see- 
. ing the place almost deserted, he drinks it off 
himself,] 

SHAKESPEARE [tO CHETTLE, wearily] \ I 
wooed the crowds with my lyrics and they gave 
me leave to strut an hour upon the boards; 
I wooed a woman and she leaves me for an- 
other. 

CHETTLE [fat and optimistic] : Perchance 
the labours of thy love are not in vain ; all things 
are born in travail, man or beast, and it may be 
that you will yet give forth some poem to im- 
mortalise this same Mistress Fitton. Men 
shall see her shadow cross the stage and wonder 
what she was, or fair or false. Born of a 
dream, they'll say, who was this Rosalind the 
140 



MARY! MARY! 

poet wooed with verses hung all about the 
libraries of the world? 

SHAKESPEARE: Hal, you speak truth. 
And yet I would that I could leave this sorry 
town; hie me away to Arden, and lie, a fool in 
the forest, to bask me in the sun. Oh! 1 
could rail on Lady Fortune, sans intermission, 
an hour by the dial. 

CHETTLE: A fig for your raillery! I 
would I were a priest that I might quench my 
thirst and impose penance on such young 
wenches as rob a poet of his wits. 

SHAKESPEARE: And so you recall me to 
mine? [To the draiver~\ Francis, two pints 
of Bastard. [Turning again to chettle.] 
And, Hal, thou shalt be a priest. I will con- 
struct a comedy and in it thou shalt play the part 
of a fat friar, grown so far in liking with thy 
folly that thou knowest not how wise in truth 
thou art; for thou art wise and witty, the butt 
of many a jest, the occasion of many a quip, but 
human, Hal — [breaking of^ May thy sins be 
upon the heads of thy traducers ! Mayest thou 
live long and merrily, and be rewarded in this 
world for the good cheer thou hast brought to 
one, the least of thy admirers. 

chettle: Not the least. Will, the least un- 
derstood. 

141 



MARY! MARY! 

SHAKESPEARE: So be it. A song, Hal, a 
song. 

The curtain descends as CHETTLE strikes 
up: 

'' When good King Arthur ruled this 
landr 



142 



UENVOI 

How shall I praise my love when every phrase 

cries out; 
' Lo ! I am barren, friend, squeezed dry by 

hands that flout 
Your efforts from the grave ? ' 
Never in words that wave like banners in the 

sky 
Shall I proclaim my love to every passerby, 

To prince and priest and knave: 
Here, here dwells Beauty's self! — And yet I 

know that she 
Plays truant from the dreams that haunted Ar- 

cady. 

Because old Homer sang, because his lids grew 

wet 
With musing on her face, Greece boasts of 
Helen yet; 
And Cleopatra's smile. 
Bathed in the tears of kings, the tears of half of 

Rome 
Mourning great Antony, lies mirrored in the 
foam 
Of her old father Nile. 
143 



MARY! MARY! 

Why should my muse be mute? no words rush 

out to swear 
Allegiance to my love? Is she not all as fair 

As those young Villon sang? as Blanche the lily- 
white ? 

Joan of Rouen Town? Dian the kings^ delight? 
I look upon her face, 

And tongue-tied turn away; I read in every line 

How the master hand of God refineth things so 
fine; 
Hers seems the perfect grace, 

And yet I know that He each day leans from 
above 

To trace new glories there. — How can I praise 
my love? 



144 



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